


fight for the fairy tale, face your demons

by Excuseyouclarke



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Demons, F/M, Mutual Pining, Nymphs - Freeform, Protective Bellamy Blake, Protective Clarke Griffin, Sharing a Bed, Sirens, There Can Be Only One, Witches, idiots to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:55:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26736223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Excuseyouclarke/pseuds/Excuseyouclarke
Summary: In Clarkes defence, strange poems in old books shouldn't lead to a magical land. Bellamy didn't have to follow her there, either.Now she's got them both stuck with only one way out - face your demons or be stuck here forever. The road home is filled with horrors that make them question everything they once thought they knew about fairy tales, and foes determined to take their souls.They must work together if they both want to make it out in one piece - which is easier said than done when they're both in denial about their feelings for each other.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 11
Kudos: 75
Collections: The t100 Writers for BLM Initiative





	fight for the fairy tale, face your demons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [useyourtelescope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/useyourtelescope/gifts).



> Happy final show day! no matter what happens - fanfiction is always here for you.
> 
> This work is a part of t100 fics for BLM, kindly donated by the lovely Useyourtelescope!

The back of her car is filled with so many boxes that she can't see out of the rear-view mirror—which is probably how she ended up reversing into Bellamy's truck. 

She winces at the bump and scrape. wondering what special kind of hell she'll have to go through to pay for this. 

"Are you kidding me?" Bellamy jumps out of his truck; it’s proudly shining and freshly waxed. Her rusting car is embarrassing in comparison.

"Sorry, I couldn't see with the boxes piled up and–"

He's not listening to her as he's inspecting the bumper of his truck. It takes no damage, unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for her car. There is a dent and a crack in the bumper that she probably won’t get fixed. What was the point? She doesn’t exactly care about how her car looks so it would just be money down the drain. 

"Why do you have so many boxes in your car anyway?” he snapped, turning to her. 

"I didn't pack it," she huffs "Miller and Raven did."

"Oh, so this is Miller and Raven's fault then? Not your bad driving?"

Jasper and Monty stop unloading Bellamy’s truck to watch the argument. Clarke thinks it’s more of an excuse to not do actual work.

"A little bit yeah.”

Bellamy huffs and shakes his head at her. He doesn’t like her—always finding faults in everything she did or said and she always retaliated. Honestly, sometimes it’s fun to wind him up, but now was not that time. Raven and Miller pull up behind them, with the last of the boxes from Raven’s old apartment. 

"Come on," Raven moans at them. "I thought you'd have started unpacking by now."

"Clarke hit Bellamy with her car," Jasper announces with a grin from the sidewalk. 

Ravens head whips to her in question. 

"I reversed into his truck—at very low speed I may add." She rolls her eyes. 

Raven looks down at her dented bumper and sighs. "To be fair, we did say the boxes may have been piled a bit too high." Raven winces apologetically.

"Don't make excuses for her bad driving," Bellamy splutters.

"You know what’s a good distraction?" Raven claps her hands together. "Moving these boxes into my apartment. Get a move on."

With a grumble, Bellamy takes a box from the back of his truck and storms into the apartment. Raven throws her a grin.

"You know, this wouldn't have happened if you splashed out on a U-Haul truck," Clarke tells her. 

Raven just shrugs. "Yeah, but all my friends are easily persuaded by the promise of alcohol and food so..."

"That they are," Clarke agrees as she opens her trunk and starts taking the boxes upstairs. 

There are two flights of stairs to contend with and lots of bodies moving up and down them, mostly with armfuls of boxes filled with Ravens stuff. The place is one of the older buildings in Arkadia—they turned into apartment buildings a few years ago much to Jasper's disgust. 

"It's haunted," he complains loudly as they're unpacking the boxes in the kitchen. "I keep getting a shiver through me like–" he shivers dramatically, causing Harper to roll her eyes at Clarke. 

"Sure it is" Clarke mutters.

"It is! This building’s over a hundred years old, imagine how many people have died in it."

"Enough of that," Raven snaps. "My apartment is not haunted."

"It might be," Jasper mutters but says no more on it. 

They separate the boxes into rooms so they're easier to unpack, everybody designated to a room and honestly, it's going well. She and Bellamy are separated so they can't start fights with each other. Monty and Jasper have been separated so they can't sit around talking or start smoking anything questionable and Raven’s doing a good job of keeping them all in line.

All is going well until Miller calls out, "I think the bulb’s out in the bathroom."

"Ahh dammit," Raven mutters, standing from her own box to fruitlessly flick the bathroom light switch. "I think the landlord said there are some spares in the basement for an emergency. Someone just needs to get it."

A chorus of "not it" came from those around her and Clarke was far too slow at understanding what was going on to try and defer herself from the job.

Raven smirks at her and says, "Looks like Clarke drew the short straw."

It definitely is the short straw—the elevator’s broken and there were at least three flights of stairs. Not to mention it was probably dusty down there, and she has no idea what she was looking for. 

"Fine," she mutters reluctantly. "What am I looking for?"

"Bellamy, what light bulb do we need?" Raven shouts. 

Bellamy comes out of the bathroom looking slightly more disgruntled than usual. "The bathroom one," he grumbles. 

Clarke refrains from rolling her eyes. "Informative. What does it look like?"

"It's long."

"Okay." Clarke sighs. "I'll just bring up a lightbulb that looks like it might go in the bathroom."

"Wait." Miller frowns "You're going down to the basement alone?"

"Yeah." Clarke shrugs. It’s not a big deal—apart from the fact that she's horrendously unfit and despises the thought of climbing up and down three flights of stairs with no clue what lightbulb to get.

"You're not scared of the demons down there?"

If she has to hear anyone else talk about ghosts, she's going to lose it. "No Miller, I'm not scared of the demons."

"Not even Captain Fidalgo?"

She takes the bait, despite Jasper paling slightly. "Pray tell, who is Captain Fidalgo?"

There's a flicker of excitement over Miller's face before he turns serious, setting the mood for his horror story. "It was after the war. Captain Fidalgo's wife and children had been killed while he was away. He came home and he started going mad—started seeing them in his sleep. Eventually, he saw them when he was awake as well. Said they looked like demons."

Jasper’s shaking on the spot, everyone is just as engrossed in the story—whether they believe it or not. 

"He begged them to leave him alone. They said they'd only do that if he did one thing—kill. So, he takes a metal hook and kills 11 people in one night. They say he strung them up in the basement of this very building. When they finally found them, he was cut into pieces too. He wrote one word in his own blood with the arm he didn't hack off—demons."

"Well, that was a lovely story," Clarke deadpans, breaking the silence. Jasper jumps at the sound of her voice, too engrossed in Miller's tales. It would be endearing if it wasn't so annoying. "I'll be back in a minute."

"If you hear a hook scraping, you'll know Captain Fidalgo's with you." Miller grins as she walks out. At least she'll have company down there. 

The basement is exactly what she expected—dark and dank. When she switches on the naked bulb that hangs from the beams, dust moats float gracefully without meaning. It's bigger than she expected down there, unorganised and hazardous. She has no idea how she'll find what she's looking for. 

She starts closest to her and works her way across, but there are no signs of lightbulbs down there. She's convinced that the landlord lied to Raven just to appease her so she wouldn't complain about the dead bulb. 

There are some interesting things down there that take her interest though—dusty old canvases with pictures she can't make heads nor tales of and chests full of old belongings that must have been left behind when old tenants moved out. There's history down there and not just the supposed ghosts of Captain Fidalgo. She spends much too much time looking through it. The bulbs might turn up eventually.

In a dark corner, there's a bookcase, caked in dust and books that look beyond ancient. There's one that calls to her though, thick and leather-bound with gold edging that doesn't seem to have aged. She pulls it out and wipes the dust off the cover, _Pugna Daemones Tuos_ written on the front in the same golden engraving as the bordering. She opens it, pages yellowing and frail, and runs her fingers across the front page, written in cursive scripture in what once would have been expensive ink. It's like something out of a fairy tale—not that she believes much in them.

"What's taking so long?" Comes a voice from behind her, making her jump pathetically. "Jasper thinks you’ve been murdered by the demons."

Bellamy’s standing disgruntled at the door of the basement. She wonders exactly how long she's been down here.

"I couldn't find the bulbs and I got distracted by—" she gestures to the treasures she's found down here. Bellamy just sticks his nose up before zeroing in on the book in her arms. 

"What's that?" He nods at it with a frown. 

"I don't know." She shrugs "It looked interesting though., I just wanted to see what was in it."

"It's not yours to look through."

"It shouldn't be in a shared basement then. I don't think it's been read it years—it was covered in dust."

Bellamy huffs and rolls his eyes at her. "Well, you can read it another time. I want to get this over with so we can hurry up and get some damn food."

The book seems to hum in her arms like it sensed she was about to put it down and forget about it. It demands her attention. 

Except Bellamy seems to sense it too. His eyes flicker to the book with a concerned, almost frightened look. "Clarke, I think you should put that down."

She doesn't want to put it down and it doesn't want to be put down. It wants to be read—it wants to be brought back to life. She flips the front page open. "No, just listen to this passage," she tries, it’s interesting, it wants to be read—she has to read it. 

"Clarke, I don't think that's a good idea."

_"Those who wander these strange new worlds,_

_Become the tales they fear,_

_Those who leave must face their demons here,_

_With their tales layout you must break the spell,_

_or succumb to stories their souls are too fragile to tell."_

There's a strange glow, otherworldly and broken, orange light filtering through. 

"Is that a door?" Bellamy demands and he's right, a door that wasn't there before is right there, humming and glowing like the book in her arms is. "Where did that come from?"

"It's probably just connected to the basement of the next building." But even as she says it, she knows it's a lie. It glows ethereal and enticing, she needs to see what's behind it. "Someone's probably down there too. I bet they've got the bulbs we're looking for." She reaches towards the handle, her body moving without her mind catching up. 

Somewhere deep down she knows this is a bad idea. Nothing good is behind that door but she has to open it—she has to know what's causing that glow.

"Don't." He sounds frightened now as he grasps her wrist. 

She looks back to him as if in a trance, seeing him but not really. The fear in his eyes barely registers as she turns away and shakes him off. The handles warm under her hand, alluring and inviting as she turns it and pushes through. 

For a moment she's blinded by the orange glow, the overpowering new smells and sounds, the hums calming and is replaced by a bird song that she's never heard before. 

When her eyes adjust, she's greeted to a meadow full of wildflowers, overgrown and untameable. Birds of vibrant blues and greens glide happily through the air, singing sweetly. The air is filled with the scents of honeysuckle and cedar wood, and in the sky sits two unearthly orange suns—their tendrils reaching towards one another as they sway to a melody that she is not privy to. 

She is completely and utterly enchanted—it’s something out of her wildest dreams when she needs to get away from reality. She thinks she'll stay. 

" – Clarke!" Bellamy's in front of her then, hands on her shoulders shaking her roughly. It pulls her out of her trance abruptly, startling her. 

"What?" She shakes her head, coming out of her daze. The air is stifling here, slightly suffocating, and Bellamy's entirely too close. 

"I was shouting you and you weren't listening. It was like you were in some sort of trance." His eyes are wide and frightened as they dart around their new surroundings. 

She looks around too, only now realising they shouldn't be here. They shouldn't have been able to get here from a basement in Arkadia. 

"Why did you follow me?" she demands, half in annoyance, half in fear—fear that she's dragged him into something he can't get out of. 

He blinks in surprise at her, like he's not sure of the answer. "You just kept walking; I didn't know what to do. It was like–" He stops, eyebrows furrowing before he shakes his head. "I don't know. Where are we?" He drops his hands from her shoulders and looks around. The unfamiliarity of the place is frightening. There's nothing like this where they're from—it doesn't even feel like a real place, it can't be. 

"I don't think we're in Arkadia anymore."

Bellamy gives her a look of concern and guilt consumes her. If she hadn't taken so long with the bulbs, she wouldn't have dragged him into this. She turns to where they came from, but gone is the door to the basement. They're surrounded by dense forest with looming trees that moan and creak in the breeze. Orange leaves shiver and cry, sending a chill through Clarke.

"How the hell do we get out?" she whispers, clutching the book to her chest.

"I don't know, but I've got a bad feeling about this place," Bellamy murmurs, still taking in the new world.

She has a bad feeling too. She should have learned not to mess with things that did not belong to her. Now she was trapped because she couldn't leave things well enough alone. 

"The book!" Bellamy exclaims suddenly, Clarke frowns down at the book in her arms. "It got us here, surely it can get us back too."

"Oh." Clarke blinks. He's right. If the book can get them there, it can get them back again. She opens the book, but apart from the first page which she'd already read, the book was empty. Just one empty, yellowing page after another. "How weird." She frowns. 

"Trust you to pick up a useless enchanted book," he mutters with a glare at the book. 

"It's not entirely useless, it got us here." She points out, much to Bellamy's annoyance. 

"It got us stuck here. And it was you who read the passage. You got us stuck."

"Well, you didn't have to follow me," she snaps as she slams the book shut. "Come on. We can't be the only ones here, someone's got to know a way out." 

She turns away from him on her heel and stalks towards the meadow. With the book hooked under her arm, she reaches out a hand and drifts it along the overgrown wildflowers.

Birdsong takes over—unlike anything she’s heard back home. It’s soft and sweet and melancholy—it makes her sad in a way she doesn’t understand. The smells are pleasantly overwhelming, and the flowers are light and soft, petals dance under her fingertips until— 

"Ahh," she gasps, jerking her hand from the flowers up to her chest. A searing pain dances from her fingertips up her arm like a flame running through her veins. 

"What?" Bellamy calls in a panic from behind her. "What happened?"

Purple blotches form on her fingertips and palm where she'd made contact with the flowers. Bellamy takes her hand to inspect it with a grimace, his thumb running over the burning skin. He's surprisingly gentle, disconcerting her with his concern. 

"Are you alright?" he asks, expression troubled as he looks her over. She's not sure they've ever made eye contact before, but now he's staring deep at her, dark eyes piercing into her own. All she can do is nod weakly in response. 

"Good." He drops her hand looks away, over the meadow, and back to the dense forest from which they came from. "I think we should go that way, through the forest."

She accepts it, not just to not start an argument, but the meadow is vast and infinite. She can't see the other end and it's a long way to be travelling when the flowers can burn you.

The forest is dark and ominous though, the trees weep and whimper in the wind, sending a chill through her. As she looks to Bellamy, she knows he feels it too by the way he glances up to the sky, darkened by the trees but the glowing suns burn through. 

She's not dressed for a trek through the woods, but neither is Bellamy, which makes her feel a bit better. She tries not to think what will happen if they can't get out of here—if she was stuck here alone it would be different, but she brought Bellamy through with her. Not that he’d had to go through, but still she couldn't forgive herself if anything happened to him here. It was her fault they were here, and she'll make sure he gets out.

Her shoes rub blisters on her heels and despite the double suns burning above, there's a chill to the air that sends goosebumps over her arms. She hadn’t imagined when she went down to the basement that she would need a jacket. Bellamy had come better prepared—he at least had proper sneakers and a jacket.

Clarke isn't jealous at all. 

It takes her a minute to notice that Bellamy wasn't beside her anymore. She frowns and turns to look at him, but he's staring dumbfounded at the book in her arms. Unless he's had some great epiphany about why they were here she doesn’t have a clue why he’s staring like that.

"What?" She raises an eyebrow at him. 

He just keeps on staring at the book. "The book," he stutters, eyes growing wider.

"What about it?"

"It's—Clarke it's glowing"

She looks down sharply and – it's certainly glowing. The gold engraving on the leather glimmers and gleams—the very core of the book seems to beam from within. 

She opens it and lets the pages fall back, landing on a page that had once been empty, but no longer was. The meadow is sketched out in perfect detail—so much so that it's almost like she's there again. She can nearly smell the honeysuckle and cedar wood and her hand burns again. The wildflowers on the page seem to be swaying in the breeze, lazily and unconcerned. Underneath, in the same pretty scripture as the passage that brought them here is written:

_In this meadow, pretty flowers entice,_

_Run through and skip do critters and mice._

_When the birdsong breaks through,_

_Come out alive do very few._

Clarke shivers, but not from the cold this time. "It looks like your instinct to you get out of the meadow was right."

Bellamy doesn't look nearly half as smug as she thought he would. Instead, there's only concern and bewilderment. It's not something she's ever seen on him before. 

Sure, she's seen him concerned before, about his sister before she left, and especially after she’d left with no trace as to where she'd gone. She's seen him concerned about their friends when they get to a party or a bar late at night or if they have to take a cab home by themselves. Despite his tough exterior, he's one of the most caring people she knows. 

To his friends anyway. As hard as she tried when they first met, she's never fallen into that category. He's always been full of snide remarks and rolled eyes that had hurt at first, but she soon stood her ground and retaliated. Thus, starting a war that she had never intended to fight. 

So she's confused when he says, "It could have warned us before it stung your hand."

She has to hold onto the book a little tighter so she doesn't drop it from the shock. Any other time she would have thought he'd be gleeful about her failing at something. But he's not—not yet at least.

Clarke just shrugs as nonchalantly as possible, trying not to show that she's flustered by the fact that he cares that she's hurt. It's honestly, a bit pathetic.

"Let's just keep going," she mutters. "This place can't be all deadly meadows."

As it turns out, it wasn't. There was also a screaming forest that gives her a headache and sends chills down her spine. It seems to just get denser, the trees closing in on them and she's about to admit that she's actually a bit frightened when a new wailing pierces through the trees. It's not the distant moans of the leaves, haunting and foreboding—it's a broken and painful and demands to be felt.

"You're going to want to check that out, aren't you?" Bellamy sighs, looking towards the direction the wailing had come from. 

"Oh, yes, I want to check that out." She strides on, Bellamy reluctantly following her. 

It doesn't take long to come across a shack—old and rickety with gaps in the wood—buried deep in the trees. It looks as though a strong breeze could knock it sideways. Smoke raises idly from the chimney, carrying a pitiful cry.

Clarke feels so far removed from reality now that she has nothing to lose by investigating. She hears Bellamy huff behind her, but she takes no notice. Instead, she knocks on the door with maybe too much force, it feels like it may crumble under her knuckles. There's a muttering between the wailing coming from inside, with a shrug, Clarke pushes open the door—much to Bellamy's dismay.

"You can't just invite yourself into strange sheds in the woods," he hisses from behind her, but she pays no attention. 

"Hello?" Clarke calls out, stepping into the shack.

It's dark and dreary light from the cracks in the wood casting batons through the tiny room. There's a rocking chair in the corner, vacant but for a neatly folded blanket and yet it rocks soothingly back and forth. The source of the muttering comes from a young woman shrouded in a black floaty dress with wild, untameable hair the colour of a desert sunset. She stands hunched over a bubbling cauldron, muttering and stirring with an air of madness. 

The wailing, however, comes from a man slumped on a stool in the corner. He howls with pain and despair—yet his eyes are cold and dead, devoid of any life. 

"Clarke, we really shouldn't–" Bellamy starts, but she hushes him. 

"It's fine," she whispers, then louder, "Hi."

The woman looks up so sharply Clarke's surprised her neck doesn’t crack. "Hello." She blinks in surprise as if they might be a mirage. 

"I'm Clarke," she introduces herself, taking another tentative step forward. The woman watches her closely, unsure. "And this is Bellamy. We're—well, we're a bit lost. I was hoping you could help."

The woman still stares uncertainly at them, then shakes her head slowly. "We're all lost. That's why it brought us here."

"What brought us here?" Clarke asks softly, as if not to startle the woman. She nods to the book clutched in Clarke's arms.

"That. It pulls through lost souls and keeps us here. No one can face their demons."

Clarke shakes her head. That can't be right—they can't be stuck here. She refuses to accept that she's doomed Bellamy like this. 

"There's got to be a way out," she deters, but the woman's gone back to stirring and muttering, the man still wails as if it will heal his broken soul.

A gust of wind blows through and the house creeks and tilts sideways slightly, but it rights itself again when then wind dies down. Clarke looks around in the concern, but the woman in front of her pays no attention to it. Bellamy shudders next to her, he really doesn’t want to be in here.

"There's a way out," the woman agrees as she looks between a book perched next to her and back to the cauldron. "North, north, north of the woods, keep following until the suns come together. The further away you get, the further away they get from each other. But nobody can face their demons."

The man in the corner looks like he may have seen a few demons. Bellamy sees it too if the way he stares concerned, brows furrowed are any indication. 

The more the woman mutters, the more bubbling that comes from her cauldron. Steam rises in tiny pillars and tinges green. The smell stings Clarke’s eyes and invades her senses, making her nose wrinkle in disgust. 

"Is he alright?" Bellamy finally asks. 

Perhaps it was the smell that made the man wail.

The woman looks up, as if only just remembering that he was perched, distraught in the corner. Maybe she's learned to block him out now—maybe she was so engrossed in whatever putrid thing she was cooking up that she’d forgotten about him entirely. 

"Oh." She blinks "No, he's not."

Bellamy gives her a sideways glance and all Clarke can do is shrug. "Well, what's wrong with him?"

The woman huffs and glares at Bellamy. "I can't seem to get the spell right. Every time he comes back, he's lost his soul. I've tried giving him souls that way I get them, but he won't take them. I just need to get the spell right. I'll put him out of his misery and try again. This time it will be perfect, I just know it."

Spell, Clarke thinks in amazement. So, she is a witch—not a very good one if she has to repeatedly kill him and bring him back. 

"Why don't you just," Clarke waves her hand nonchalantly, "Let him go and rest in peace?"

The witch stares at her in disgust, as if she'd suggested—well, exactly what she had suggested. To kill someone and let them go forever. 

"I can't," The witch tells her bluntly. "I love him. Haven't you ever loved somebody so much you'd go to the end of the earth just to bring them back, even if it's just for a glimpse.”

Something pangs deep inside her. It wasn't supposed to hurt her, but it did. "No." She sighs softly. "I haven't."

Bellamy's looking at her with an expression she can't quite decipher. She expects him to mock her, but he doesn't. Perhaps that will come later, but for now, she just blushes and looks away.

"We should go," Bellamy murmurs, his hand clasping around her arm gently. Clarke nods in agreement and smiles her thanks to the witch.

"Wait," The witch calls as they reach the door. "You two would make the most delicious children."

"Oh." Clarke flutters, not understanding until Bellamy stiffens next to her. _"Oh."_

"Time to leave." Bellamy holds her arm a little tighter—as if she weren't desperate to get out—and pulls her through the door, letting it swing shut behind them. He carries on pulling her through the woods, putting as much distance between them and the hovel as they can.

Finally, he slumps on a patch of grass surrounding a tree and leans against it, sweat beading on his forehead and cheeks flushed. Clarke takes a moment too, although she doesn't seem to be taking it as badly as he is. 

His heavy breathing doesn't get any calmer, only seeming to get worse. He's staring ahead, eyes wide and panicked, and chest heaving. 

"That wasn't real," he finally splutters. "It can't have been. A witch in the woods trying to bring back her dead lover by eating children."

"I don't think she eats children," Clarke tries to reason, though she knows she's reasoning with the wrong thing.

"She was actually making potions in a cauldron. She’s practising necromancy, Clarke. How are so calm about this?"

How was she so calm about this? In a strange way, she'd just sort of accepted it. She should be freaking out that a door in a basement had led to a strange new world, but for some reason, she's fine with it.

Poor Bellamy, on the other hand, was absolutely not fine with it. He was close to hyperventilating, eyes about to pop out of his head.

"Hey," she murmurs, tentatively reaching out to place a hand on his cheek. She didn't know how well he'd react as he didn't like her in the real world and he probably likes her even less in a strange new place that she’d led them to. But he doesn't flinch away from her. "Stay with me, okay? Breathe with me."

He copies her slow breathing until he's calmed. His skin is hot and flushed under her hand—she's left it there a beat too long when she finally drops it. He's still looking at her cautiously—maybe too intense, so she looks away to hide her blush.

He's so beautiful, it's so goddamn unfair that she’s never stood a chance with him. But why would she?

"Your stupid books glowing again," he snaps, panic returning to his tone. 

A glowing book of rhymes will probably do it. Once again there's a beautiful sketch of the Witches shack, surrounded by looming trees with smoke billowing from the chimney.

Underneath reads:

_In this shack the old witch hides_

_While the spells she lives by tells her lies._

_Her dead lover sits and wails_

_Her potions to save him only fails._

_To keep her young children she'll take,_

_Her youthful glow deceptively fake._

"I told you she eats children," Bellamy mutters "She's a witch who lives in the woods. What else would she eat?"

Clarke grimaces and wonders if the putrid smell coming from the cauldron was children or something else—something worse. What could be worse? She dreads to think.

"If she's a witch, why doesn't she just magic herself a nicer place instead of living in a hovel in the woods?"

Bellamy stares at her as if she's grown another head—which is entirely possible. "That's what you're choosing to focus on?" he demands and Clarke just shrugs. She'd rather not focus on the eating children bit. "Surely this is some kind of shared hallucination or something," he continues, "maybe there's a carbon monoxide leak in the basement. Does that give you hallucinations?"

"I don't know."

"Did I fall down the stairs and hit my head?"

The sky turns a deep, vibrant red as the suns seem to fizzle, their tendrils that once reached towards one another shrink away in a violent dance. 

"Bellamy–"

"Did I fall asleep? Is this a dream? It's got to be a dream. Why am I dreaming about you in a fairy tale?"

The sky darkens and turns ominous, the vibrant red turning a deep, dark blood-like shade as the suns continue to crackle and shrivels—taking the heat with it and leaving behind a shocking chill in the air. If the suns were supposed to get closer as they approached their exit, what did it mean when they disappeared? 

"Bellamy!" 

"What?" He seems to come to then, head snapping to her in frustration. She jerks her head at the suns—almost disappeared now as they slowly shrink to nothing. "Holy Shit." 

He breathes, eyes glued to the dissolving suns. 

"Yeah," Clarke agrees faintly.

When the light finally abandons them, they're left in a night so black that she can barely see Bellamy sat in front of her. She reaches out, grasping in the darkness and when her hand finally collides with Bellamy's arm she holds on tight. He doesn't flinch away—not that she could see it if he did, so she keeps her hand there and lets her eyes adjust to the darkness.

They didn’t have time to adjust when there is a buzz and a flurry of wings, hundreds of fireflies fill the air, flashing in a symphony of colours that light up the darkness.

It's beautiful.

"Do you think these will try and kill us?"

"Don't ruin it, Bellamy."

They're silent for a long while—Clarke waits for her book to glow, but it doesn't and now she's at a loss. Surely this is just night—their journey can't be over when they’d just gotten here. There was nothing about a time limit.

She didn't even know how much time had passed. She doesn't have a watch and she'd left her phone in Raven's apartment. That's not to say time is the same here. They could be moving faster or slower, they could be frozen in time completely.

Had anyone realised they were gone yet? Were they even gone though, or was it like Bellamy had said? Just some strange hallucination or a fever dream—maybe she’d hit her head in the basement.

"Clarke, hey look at me." Bellamy's voice breaks through her panic. He's looking at her softer than before—softer than he ever has. 

"Just breathe. It's going to be alright."

She lets out the breath the hadn't realised she was holding, shaky and scared—it was finally catching up on her. 

"Look." He sighs, resigned. "I don't know what's going on, but we need to stick together. We're not going to make it alone so as much as it pains me to say, we need each other."

Clarke nods in acceptance. She knows she's the last person Bellamy would want to be stuck here with so the fact he wants to work with her shows how worried he is. 

She's worried too, but it hadn't sunk in until just now when it's hit her like a truck and she can't escape the panic swirling in her chest.

"I don't know how long this night is going to last," he continues "We'll take turns on watch. Why don't you get some sleep? I'll wake you up in a couple of hours."

She wants to say no—to let him take rest first, after all, it is her fault that they’re there, but her eyes are heavy and maybe she does need to sleep. Maybe this is all a dream and when she wakes up, she'll be at home or back in the basement with a headache.

Reluctantly, she lays down on the soft grass and closes her eyes, willing for the darkness to just take her.

*

Clarke sleeps curled up beside him, fitfully but it's to be expected. He couldn't sleep right now—he's too on edge, too keyed up to even think about resting. 

Clarke had been amazingly calm throughout it. It was only when the darkness fell that she starts panicking. But she's a strong person—she always has been. You had to be a special kind of resilient to go against what your family told you to do and follow your dreams, even if it meant she went broke most of the time. She was doing what she loved, and Bellamy had always envied her for that.

Fireflies still flit around them, illuminating the night in a way he's never seen before. They never seem to lose their glow—still as bright as when they first appeared. 

There's no stars or moon, just eerie darkness that doesn't seem to let up. It was like a blanket dropped around them once the suns had fizzled out. It was without a doubt the most bizarre thing he had ever seen. 

Clarke shivers in her sleep and he frowns. The night was cold without the suns and Clarke was only in a thin t-shirt. Gently, so not to wake her, he places a hand on her arm and then flinches back at her cold skin. He shrugs off his jacket and places it over her. At least he can get up and walk around to get some heat, while she's just lying still.

A firefly lands on her hand and he tries to shoo it away in case it stings or burns or - anything really. He’d never thought that the flowers would burn as they did, but here it seems that anything goes.

After all, there was a goddamn child-eating witch in the woods trying to bring her dead lover back to life. It was like nothing he could have dreamt of and surely that must be what it must be, right? Just a dream? It was the only logical explanation. But logic seemed to be going out the window. There was nothing logical about this place and as bizarre as it is - it never felt like a dream. It feels solid and real. 

The firefly on Clarke's hand illuminates the strange purple rash trailing down her fingers and palm. He traces a finger over the rash, and she flinches in her sleep, closing her fingers. The firefly makes a quick getaway and he feels guilty for touching it when he knew it would probably be painful.

It could have been so much worse.

She hasn't complained though, not once. 

He has this strange perception of Clarke in his head. The Clarke he thinks she should be and the Clarke that she is. 

In his head, she should be a brat—a spoiled princess who gets everything she wants with the bat of an eyelash. That's how her upbringing should determine her. From what he's heard of Abby Griffin, her parenting style was harsh but passive. Clarke got what she wanted if it gave her mother a quiet life, but she had expectations to live up to and when she didn't live up to them, she was kicked to the curb.

That wasn't Clarke though. She was passionate and fiery, kind and compassionate, but when they'd met, he couldn't get over his prejudice and well—it's not like a girl like Clarke would ever go for someone like him anyway. So, he'd put a wall up between them. 

There was no place for prejudices or walls here. If they were going to make it through wherever the hell they were, they needed to work together. 

He tries not to think of the trials and tribulations that are yet to come—the pretty flowers with the deadly sting and the cannibal Witch might just be the beginning. 

If only Clarke's book would tell pre-warn them instead of giving them rhymes when they'd already lived it. It was useless. Surely it should act as a guide and not as a tool to taunt them?

Clarke continues to sleep peacefully beside him, but his eyes are growing heavy watching the fireflies dance. He doesn't want to fall asleep on watch—he doesn't know who or what might be out there, so he shakes Clarke's shoulder gently to wake her. 

"What?" She asks groggily, half sitting up, "What's happening?" She looks around, confused by her surroundings. 

He watches the realisation dawn over her that they're still here, trapped in a strange land with no solid way out as of yet. She blinks and looks around, up at the swooping fireflies and finally down before landing on the jacket draped across her shoulders. 

"You were cold," he explains bashfully, suddenly embarrassed by the act of kindness. "I could at least get up and walk around, but you were shivering in your sleep." He shrugs, trying to sound as passive as possible. 

"Oh." 

He swears she’s blushing, but it's hard to tell in the light. She passes the jacket back to him and asks, "How long was I asleep?"

"Hard to say. A few hours at least."

She nods and stands, stretching her hands above her head. "I'll wake you up when the suns come up—hopefully anyway." She gives him a sheepish smile and walks towards the trees. He lays down and watches her as she looks around in wonder. 

"Hey," he calls before he closes his eyes. She whips her head around to look at him curiously. "Don't wander too far, okay?"

She nods with a small smile and then he closes his eyes and amazingly, sleep comes easily.

+

Much to his disappointment, he wakes on damp grass to a purple-pink sky—the duel suns hazily glow on the horizon. Smoke fills his nose—not like anything he's ever smelt before from a fire. It's woody and earthy, but there's a spice to it he can't quite place. 

Clarke sits over a small fire, flames of vibrant blue and green spit up towards the sky. It lights up the look of concentration etched on her face mixed with fear and concern. She looks up when she notices she's being watched and grins at him. "I'm surprised the trees didn't wake you up."

What an odd sentence to be woken up by, he thinks. "What were the trees doing, pray tell?"

In lieu of an answer, she sticks out her leg and pulls up the leg of her jeans unceremoniously. With a sigh, he stands and although his back screams in protest he walks over and sits next to her by the fire. For such a small thing it throws off a lot of heat.

Why didn't he think of making a fire last night?

There's a thick bruise wound around Clarke's ankle, angry red turning purple—it had to hurt like a bitch.

"How the hell did that happen?" he demands, prodding it gently. She flinches and pulls her leg away, back to her chest. 

"The trees weren't very happy about being used for firewood," she tells him, a rueful smirk on her lips. 

"I'm sorry, the trees did that to your ankle?"

She shrugs, almost embarrassed. "Yeah. I started making a fire and one of the roots wrapped around my ankle. It was easy enough to get off once I started hitting it."

"Jesus," he mutters. Witches and killer forests. He doesn't even want to jinx it by wondering if this place can get any stranger.

"We need to find water soon and food. We won't get very far without them."

He nods in agreement. They'd be no good dehydrated and starving, and with no idea how far they had to go. They needed water at the very least and soon. 

"We need to go that way," she continues, jerking her head towards a small trail between the trees, away from the witch’s hovel. "The suns got slightly closer together when I went that way so..." She shrugs like it was nothing. But what she'd worked out was no small thing. She'd adapted already to how this new place worked better than he had. She'd actually been productive while on watch He’d just had an internal crisis. 

"We should get on then." He nods, standing and then holding a hand out for her. She takes it gratefully and stands with a wince. "Are you alright to walk on your ankle?"

"I'm fine," she assures him with a small smile, but he can see the pain in her eyes. 

He's not sure what the alternative is though. With no water he can't carry her—he'll exhaust way too fast, and then he'll be completely useless. 

He walks as slow as possible, setting the pace slower than Clarke usually would, and though she's trying not to show it, she's still limping. He hopes they find a water source soon. 

He hopes the water’s drinkable here.

He hopes that when they find food it doesn't poison them.

He's found an entirely new source of anxiety now. He tries not to show it, not this time anyway.

The trees cry like before. At least at night, it was quiet. Even though they couldn't go anywhere it was the perfect time for rest. It meant that when the suns were up, they needed to cover as much ground as possible. God knows how long it would take for them to get out of there. The suns didn't look anywhere near close to colliding.

How much longer would they be put through this hell? And what kind of hells would they have to go through before the end was near?

He realises that Clarke's falling behind, her face is set in determination, but pale with a sheen of sweat clinging to her. 

"Hey," he murmurs with a frown, "are you alright?"

She nods, but it's weak and feeble. He's about to offer himself as a crutch, to help them along when suddenly her eyes widen in shock as she looks beyond him and gasps. "When did that get there?"

He grimaces and turns to where she's looking, stopping short. He'd been staring in that direction so he would have seen the wood cabin that has manifested between the trees. There was no way that it had been there before.

This place just keeps getting stranger and stranger. 

He walks back to Clarke and knowing she won't accept his help if he offers, he takes the offer away and winds his arm around her waist and lets her lean on him. She puts an arm around his shoulder and puts her weight on him gratefully. He’s suddenly taken aback by the closeness and the intimacy. He's always avoided being close to her—he's always known it was pointless. She'd never be interested in a man like him.

Now they have no choice but to be close. 

As they get closer to the cabin there's a wooden sign, carved crudely and deeply saying The Trading Post. Clarke quirks an eyebrow and asks, "Got anything to trade?"

"Yeah." He smirks "You."

She snorts and bumps him with his hip. He can't stop the grin from spreading over his face. 

The doors wide open when they arrive and as they step over the threshold, they both stop dead in amazement. 

A rocking chair rocks happily by itself in the corner, slowly back and forth as a cat curls sleeping and purring happily. A mop wrings itself out and swirls in circles on the floor, the water drying as soon as the mop leaves it. Despite the darkness in the cabin, there's a calming glow. Objects lay on shelves pristine and shiny, there’s a child’s toy car that runs back and forth across the shelf by itself.

It was otherworldly and yet it felt like a safe haven from what they've just been through.

"Hello, weary travellers" comes a voice. They look across to see a smiling woman beside a bookcase, blonde hair pulled back and a kind face. They could do with that right now. "You're new here."

"How can you tell?" Clarke half laughs and the woman just grins back, making her way over to them. 

"New travellers always pass through—t's a rite of passage." She shrugs. "Come, take the weight off your feet a bit—you look like you could use it."

"We could." Bellamy smiles gratefully and out of nowhere, there are seats behind them. He helps Clarke down first, making sure she takes the weight off her ankle. He sees the brave front she's putting on, but the wince and pain in her eyes is unmistakable. There's a stab of guilt there—that she’d gotten injured while he was fast asleep and didn't realise something had happened. 

When he sits, he's pleasantly surprised at just how comfortable the seat actually is considering it looks like an ordinary wooden kitchen chair. 

"You're injured." The woman frowns, looking down at her swollen ankle.

"Yeah." Clarke grimaces, flexing her foot with a wince. "The trees weren't happy I was using them as firewood—understandable really."

This draws a smile as the woman kneels before them to take Clarke's leg in her hands. "The trees are all-consuming here. They'll take what they can get."

Bellamy raises an eyebrow. Stranger and stranger. "All-consuming? As in?"

"As in they'll destroy whatever they can—people, animals, other trees that get too close. It's how they grow."

"Great," Bellamy mutters "Cannibalistic trees to match the cannibal witch.”

It earns a snort from Clarke, but the woman lights up. "Oh." She grins. "You've met Luna."

"If she's the witch trying to bring her husband back from the dead then yes, we’ve met Luna." Clarke looks amused at what had horrified him, but then he's not sure what's happening has fully sunk in for her yet. He's worried that when it does, she's going to crash completely and he needs her with him. There's no way he can navigate this land without her. 

"Derrick was sent mad by the final test. He lost his mind and his life. Luna's spent her years here since trying to bring him back," the woman tells them with a sad look. 

Bellamy feels it too—to be so consumed by a love that you would dedicate your life to bringing them back is both heart-wrenching and heart-warming. 

"I've got some balm that will heal this right up." She stands and walks to the back of the cabin. 

Bellamy takes the moment to look over at Clarke. She's staring at the ground with her eyebrows furrowed and lips twisted. She feels it too. 

"I'm Clarke, by the way," Clarke introduces herself when the woman kneels again holding a pot with yellow, thick glistening balm in it. "And this is Bellamy."

"I'm Niylah." The woman smiles. She takes a blob of the balm on her fingers and rubs it over Clarke's ankle. He watches carefully for her reaction, to see whether it's hurting her, but her eyes just widen in wonder so it must be doing some good. "What year is it, anyway? Back in your world."

Bellamy exchanges a look with Clarke, "It's 2020 What year is it here?"

"There are no years here. We just take every day as it comes—there's nothing left here to count down to." Niylah shrugs, but there's a sadness that she's trying to mask. 

Next to him, Clarke shudders delicately as unease settles over him. 

"Oh! How did Seinfeld end? I used to love that show." Niylah asks, brightening up once again.

"Seinfeld? That finished in the nineties. How long have you been here?" Clarke utters with wide eyes.

"I came here in —oh God, ‘93."

He's surprised Clarke's neck doesn't snap with how fast her head whips around to look at him. 

"Niylah, you've been here longer than I've been alive," she murmurs sympathetically. 

But Bellamy's in complete shock that she's been here for twenty-seven years and she doesn't seem to have noticed or aged—unless she came as a toddler. 

Niylah just shrugs though, seemingly unaffected now. "It's just what it is. Anyway, Seinfeld—please say it ended well."

"Controversial opinion but no," Bellamy answers bluntly. Clarke huffs out a laugh next to him. 

"Not that controversial," Clarke informs him with a grin., Niylah looks crestfallen though. "Full House got a sequel though and it was actually quite good."

"Oh, well that's good." Niylah smiles again. "How does your ankle feel now?"

Clarke rolls her ankle with a confused frown. “Better than ever, actually. What is that stuff?”

Niylah smirks and screws the lid back onto the pot. “It’s my own recipe, good isn’t it?”

“It’s amazing. I need some of that for back home.”

Home, Bellamy thinks wistfully. When will they ever get back home? What treacherous routes will lead them back?

“Sorry, if I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” Niylah grins, though Bellamy fears she may be telling the truth.

“The meadow already tried that,” Bellamy points out, “and the trees.”

Niylah’s expression darkens and there’s a pit in Bellamy’s stomach. “There are much worse things out there than poisonous flowers and wild tree roots.”

It’s an ominous warning, one that confirms a deep fear. Their journey is long and perilous, one that they may not make it out of alive. Still, he hopes that he’ll go to sleep and wake up back in Arkadia, with a banging headache and whispers of a strange dream.

Maybe they’re in Jumanji. 

Niylah stands and walks back to where she came from. “You two put your feet up for a bit, I’ll get you some food.”

Bellamy sits back on the chair, suddenly realising that everything aches, even places he didn’t realise could ache. 

When did his fingernails start aching?

“I’m sorry,” Clarke murmurs suddenly, looking down at her hands wrung in her lap. “I didn’t mean to get us trapped here. You told me not to mess with the book and I did it anyway.”

“It’s not your fault,” he sighs “to be fair, books aren’t supposed to lead us to strange lands.”

She smiles ruefully but doesn’t look up at him. 

“Hey, I mean it - this isn’t your fault. You were right, I didn’t have to follow you,” he tells her gently. 

“Why did you follow me?”

He pauses for a moment, why did he follow her? He knew that going through a door that just magically appeared in a basement would lead to nothing but trouble, but then - she was completely stuck in some kind of a trance, no matter how much he grabbed at her or shouted it was like he didn’t exist, she just kept walking, like something was pulling her in. 

It had scared the crap out of him.

But then, he couldn’t let her go in there alone, he knew there was something bad here, and it wanted her. 

He couldn’t let it have her.

“I don’t know,” is what he settles on. “You just kept walking and I couldn’t get your attention, it’s not like I meant to follow you. I didn’t think some weird magical doorway would lead us here then disappear completely.”

She nods but looks almost disappointed by his answer. He’s not sure what she was expecting her to hear. “I’m sorry,” she mutters again, but there were no uses in apologies now, all they could do is try their hardest to get out of here. 

A table appears in front of them, making them jump. 

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that,” Clarke mutters.

“Hopefully you won’t have to.”

Niylah brings over two steaming bowl and places them in front of them. He’s grateful in more ways than one, at least he knows there’s food here that won’t kill them, unless- 

“This isn’t going to kill us, is it?” He asks, poking the stew around with a spoon.

“It’s not in my best interest to kill people,” Niylah says with a raised brow. 

“That’s good because I’m starving.” Clarke picks up her spoon and takes a mouthful without hesitation. He only wishes he had her faith in this land. 

He takes a cautious bite and it’s good, at the very least it doesn’t taste poisonous. 

When they’re finished and the table disappears, Niylah leads them to a room, small but probably functional. 

If there’s only one person, that is. 

The small, narrow single bed in the middle of the room will no doubt cause some problems sleeping. He’s about to question it, but Niylah’s already left the room, closing the door with a soft click behind her. Clarke smiles sheepishly at him.

“You can take the bed, the chairs comfy enough, and we don’t have to take watch tonight.” She tells him.

“I can’t let you take the chair,” he frowns, the chair in the corner was no different to the ones they’d been sitting on to eat, and while they were comfy enough, she certainly couldn’t spend the entire night sleeping on one. “We can at least take it in turns.”

“No, it's not fair. I led you here, the least I can do is let you have a good sleep for the night.”

“Why don’t we sort it out when it comes to it? We’ve got the rest of the day without worrying about sleeping just yet.” He tries to reason, but he knows there’s no way he’s letting her sleep on a chair all night. Luckily, she smiles and nods and puts the conversation to rest.

Niylah tells them they can spend the day exploring around the cabin and getting used to the land, so Bellamy uses the opportunity to see what kind of wonders the cabin holds. It seems to be a matryoshka of rooms, each holding their own oddity’s and marvels. There’s a room with a shining suit of armour, he’s no expert – he could have been, in another life – but it looks genuine, with a glistening sword with an intricately decorated handle. When he gets too close it comes to life and swings at him, head tilted with a challenge he’s not going to accept. 

In another room, there’s a music box on the floor on its own with a dancing figure in the middle, spinning endlessly and when he stoops down to get a closer look, the figures softly sobbing, tears stream down her face and on its rotation blue eyes meet his – impossibly sad and haunting. He stands and leaves, wondering how on Earth they got in there.

Each room leaves him amazed and startled, fearful and perplexed by the mystery this place holds. When he decides he needs some air he’s surprised that the suns are already fizzling out of existence, bathing the land in a blazing red haze.

Clarke’s sat on the floor by a tree with Niylah, paper and pencil in hand furiously sketching, biting her lip in concentration. 

He sits quietly next to them, Niylah smiles at his arrival but Clarke doesn’t seem to notice, too engrossed in what she’s sketching. 

He sits patiently until she’s finished, and she finally looks up at him and smiles self-consciously. 

“Survival 101,” she explains, holding up her pile of papers for him to see. He flicks through the pages, each with drawings and annotations in immaculate detail. He’s never really seen much of Clarke’s art before, he’s always kept a healthy distance between them, but he knows she’s amazingly talented. “Niylah’s been showing me what’s edible and what will kill us.”

“Oh,” he feels a bit stupid, having spent the day exploring when Clarke has once again been more productive than he even thinks of being. “Sorry, I didn’t even think of that, I got kind of caught up in everything in there,” he gestures back towards the cabin.

“No, it’s fine, the suit of armour tried to take my head off, so I decided it wasn’t really for me.”

He huffs out a laugh, “Yeah, it tried with me too.”

“That’s just Henry,” Niylah pipes up “he’s harmless really.”

“That sword didn’t look harmless,” Clarke mutters but drops it.

The suns crackle and fade to nothing and once again they’re blanketed in darkness before the fireflies flash up into existence. 

They’re all quiet for a moment, just taking in the night. Niylah leaves them while they sit against the cabin, comfortably silent and for the first time, he might accept that this is a real place. For the first time, he doesn’t think he’ll fall asleep and wake up back at home, despite how desperately he wants to. 

As he looks over to Clarke, illuminated in the colourful glow gazing up in awe, for the first time he thinks being here might not be the worst thing. 

Niylah brings them some food and a drink that might be mead, it’s floral and sweet and not too strong, he might take some back to Jasper and Monty so they can see how to make actual homemade alcohol, not the gasoline they try to pass off as Moonshine. 

It’s a peaceful change from last night, and though he knows this can’t last forever, in the morning their rest bite will end and they’ll be back to fending off the elements, he’s happy to just lay back and indulge in the tranquillity of the night. 

It’s not tense with Clarke now, but then, they didn’t really have a choice now. Their feelings have to be pushed down if they’re going to make it. They need to work together, and for the first time, it may not be the worst thing he can imagine. 

Niylah leaves them fresh clothes to sleep in and the promise of their clothes being clean in the morning. Awkwardly, they both stand it’s their nightclothes in their arms with no idea what they should be doing right now. 

The rooms bathed in candlelight from a single candle on the bedside table. Ordinarily, a candle wouldn’t cast such a glow, but Bellamy suspected this was not an ordinary candle. 

They were not in an ordinary place.

“I’ll erm – I’ll go outside to the toilet to get dressed,” Clarke mutters fumblingly, turning stiffly and walking outside. He’s left with an armful of clothes and a dilemma about a bed. He changed quickly and leave his clothes outside the door like Niylah asked him to. 

He’s pacing the small distance when the door creaks open and Clarke steps through, closing the door softly behind her. She’s wearing a white floor-length nightgown, light and floaty with capped sleeves. She turns from the door and looks over at him with a laugh.

“What?” He asks self-consciously, Clarke just shakes her head.

“You look like a pirate,” she gestures to his puffy white shirt “Sam Bellamy.”

He just smiles softly “you look like a princess.”

For a change, he doesn’t mean it as an insult. He swears she blushes when she looks away. 

“You take the bed,” she tells him once again. 

“Clarke,” he sighs “we’re both adults, I’m sure we can get through one night in the same bed.”

She smiles tightly at him, “Yes, I’m sure we can be mature about it – and not kill each other for one night.”

“It’ll be a struggle, I’m sure we can manage it, though,” he says in jest and it breaks the tension a bit. 

It’s awkward, getting into bed next to her when it’s just a tight and narrow space. Despite how rickety it looks the bed is comfortable, but somehow it doesn’t surprise him. Clarke clings to the edge of the bed, and although it’s a tight fit she can take up a little more room.

He sighs heavily and mutters “don’t make this weird, sit up.”

With a frown, she does as he asks and sits half up, he puts an arm over her side for her to lie on. She’s hesitant, but finally lies down, closer to him this time and comfier, not trying to squish themselves onto their own sides now. He blows out the candle and lets the darkness envelop them. 

The only sound was their soft measured breathing, Bellamy could count the exact number of breaths Clarke was taking, but slowly they evened out and he felt her relax next to him as she succumbed to sleep. 

Sleep, however, was not as easy for him. The day was daunting and left him with more questions than answers, and though he was reassured that Clarke had taken to learning how to survive here, they weren’t much closer to finding a way out than they were this morning.

Next to him, Clarke sighs in her sleep and he wants to sigh back, he wants to say _oh, I know the feeling._ Instead, he blames it on the exhaustion when he turns towards her and drifts to sleep with her hair in his face.

That’s how he wakes up, except he’s on his back now, and Clarke’s turned in towards him. He holds his breath while he untangles himself, his arms gone numb and there’s hair in his mouth, but it was fine because Clarke still slept soundly. 

He tiptoes over to where Clarke left her book, the pages she’s drawn earlier in a neat pile on top. Silently he picks them up and flicks through, different fruits and vegetables drawn in immaculate detail cover the pages, each annotated with whether they’re edible or not and if or how to cook them. 

It was impressive to say the least, her drawings were realistic and perfect, but something caught his eye on every page. 

Face your demons.

He frowns, _demons,_ that’s what Miller had said in his ghost story, written in blood on the floor. Luna, the witch in the woods had said it too.

_No one can face their demons._

What did It mean though?

“Hey,” Clarke’s suddenly behind him, making him jump more than she should. “did you sleep alright?”

“Yeah,” he breaths, not looking at her. She still looks like a princess, even when she’s just woke up and her hairs wild. “Did you?”

“Better than the last night,” she says with a smirk and he hums in agreement, still looking at her drawings. 

“These are really good,” he tells her in earnest, she smiles tightly in return but makes no comment. “Face your demons, I keep hearing that.”

“Niylah said it’s how we get out, she said it’s what keeps people here too. I don’t really understand it,” she murmurs with a frown.

He doesn’t understand it either. How does one face their demons? He’s already faced a few in his lifetime, and he’s sure there’s more to come, he doesn’t want to face them here too, he just wants to go home. Though home seems more like a fairy tale compared to the nightmare he’s currently living.

Niylah’s left their clothes - clean and dry – outside their room, Clarke goes outside again to get dressed and he does the same in the room, then goes out to where Niylah’s cooking over a stove.

“Good morning,” She grins, stirring a pot of something that smells like porridge, but here can never be too sure here. 

“Morning,” he nods, sitting at the table he doesn’t think was there the day before. “Thank you, for housing us for the night and everything, we both really appreciate it.”

“It’s no problem,” she beams happily, “I enjoy having people come through. We don’t see as many these days, not many people read passages in strange old books anymore.”

Bellamy snorts, “Tell Clarke that.”

“Tell Clarke what?” Comes Clarke’s voice from behind him, making him flush from the embarrassment of being caught talking about her. 

“That people don’t read passages in strange old books and get themselves stuck in another dimension,” he explains as Niylah puts the porridge down in front of them.

“Oh, that,” she mutters, picking up her spoon, “I think I may have learnt a valuable lesson about that.”

“Don’t worry,” Niylah soothes, “It happens to the best of us.”

They eat in silence as Niylah potters around, the cabin still fascinates him, there’s always something moving and turning, things switch places on their own and dust seems to eliminate itself.

He’s always shied away from using the term magic, he learnt at a young age that wishes don’t come true, any fantasy life he could take solace in would be firmly and harshly ripped away from the reality of having to grow up far too soon, with a little sister to raise and a mother who worked far too much and handed him too much responsibility at a young age. But to see it here, laid out so clearly his eyes and mind can hardly keep up, it makes him wistful of a life he’s never had, one filled with magic and adventure, of witches and magical trees, suits of armours that come to life in challenge. 

Though he would not want to stay, it’s the solace he would have liked as a child, to run away in his head to a place beyond his wildest imagination. If only he’d had the time.

As they’re getting ready to leave, Niylah passes them a backpack with a wry smile. “For your travels,” she explains. “Clarke knows about what you can and can’t eat, but there’s a blanket and a water canister and some things to cook with. Just remember to follow the suns and don’t get too distracted by the people you meet; it only makes the journey longer.”

“Thank you,” Clarke says, heartfelt and genuine. “For everything. I don’t know how we would have carried on without you.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Niylah assures them. “Just remember, the road you take is full of warnings of what happens when you can’t face your demons. The final test is designed to keep you here, your demons are dark and daunting, some face them, but many don’t. I wish you luck.”

With that final word of ominous warning they leave, back into the forest of screaming trees with heavy hearts. The suns lazily move closer together, a sign that they’re going in the right direction. It’s reassuring, but still, the suns aren’t close enough. 

They haven’t been walking long when Clarke’s book begins to glow again. He’s beginning to notice a pattern.

“Clarke –”

“I know,” she sighs, opening the book. The passage appears before their eyes, Niylah’s cabin seems to build itself on the page.

_When most in need come to the trading post,_

_For weary travellers, it’s a welcome host._

_Put up your feet and take what you need,_

_Though the warning you get you should always heed._

_From here on out the journey will start,_

_Wise words are given when you part._

_The next one you meet may sell you cons,_

_But rest assured they’ve faced their demons._

“What do you take away from that?” Clarke sighs, closing the book with a gentle thud.

“That someone’s going to sell us a con?”

“Fantastic,” Clarke sighs “Let’s go see what they’re selling.”

The day is hot and close, sweat beads on his forehead and drips down his back. He can see Clarke struggling too, but they've yet to come across a water source.

The day drags on relentlessly, the heat doesn’t let up and Bellamy has no idea when the suns will set. So they keep on going, following the suns until finally, they reach a lake, blue hues sparkle and dance as the water ripples. It’s peaceful here, and as the suns are beginning to shrink, he figures it would be a good place to rest for the night.

Clarke digs through the pack while Bellamy scouts the area, trying to find a space far enough away from the trees that they’re not worried about being crushed by the roots, but still somewhere soft enough to sleep. They’d been spoiled by a soft bed last night, but at least they’ll have more room tonight. One of them will still have to be on alert though, so there won’t be a full night’s sleep for either of them. 

He’s found a space when he looks up to see Clarke collecting sticks from the floor as she walks in circles.

“What are you doing?” He calls over to her, she looks up in surprise. 

“Collecting firewood.” She tells him bluntly like it was the most obvious thing in the world. 

“Okay,” he nods “why are you walking around in circles to do that?”

“Niylah said the trees won’t attack if you keep moving when you’re collecting the wood, it’s only if you collect it from the same place.” 

“Of course it is,” he sighs, dragging a hand over his face. 

“You’re not freaking out on me, are you?”

“No,” he huffs “no, it’s just a lot to take in, isn’t it - magic and stuff?”

Clarke sits next to him and drops her armful of sticks in a pile on the floor. “I still think this is all a dream,” she confesses as she starts arranging her pile. “I think that at some point I’m going to just wake up in the basement or in bed or something. It feels like I’m through the looking glass.”

He nods in understanding, maybe this is all a dream, a very elaborate and long dream, but as time goes on, he doubts it. Clarke picks up one of her sticks and rubs it between her palms. He watches in fascination as blue-green smoke rises, but there’s no flame yet.

“Come here,” he sighs, sitting closer to her and taking over the fire. He rubs the stick more vigorous than she did, pulling his hands downwards for more friction. He hears Clarkes delighted laugh when the flames spark and he crouches down to blow on them.

“That took me an hour the other night, how did you do it so fast?”

He smiles briefly, but the memories that were once happy are now shrouded with pain. “I used to take Octavia camping, not very often – just when we needed to get away from the house for a bit. It was pretty inexpensive to do, we had an old a neighbour gave us a tent and we took plenty of blankets. I learnt most things from a book I borrowed from the library, read it every day and practised in the back yard so I was prepared.”

“That’s really sweet,” Clarke smiles, Bellamy looks away, too consumed by the happy memories that would never be again. “She’ll come around, Octavia – see how special you are, and how much you love her. She just needs her time to be wild.”

Bellamy nods as he looks into the blue – green tinged flames. Clarke doesn’t push it, just takes the canister from the pack, and takes it to fill in the lake. They boil it over the flames and leave it to cool as the suns disappear and leave the sky burning red.

Clarkes looking wistfully out to the horizon, blonde hair tinged pink from the glow. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

She’s looking at the suns setting, but he’s looking at her. “Yeah,” he agrees softly, “beautiful.”

The glows replaced by the blackness of night and and the buzzing and flashing of the vibrant fireflies. Is this something you ever get used to? The beauty of the nights, is this what keeps people here? 

No, it’s something else. He can feel it in his bones, the demons they’re promised. Can he face his demons?

“Hey,” she bumps him with her shoulder catching his attention. She passes him the blanket and says, “I’ll take first watch; you get some sleep.”

Ordinarily, he’d let her sleep first, but she looks like she wants some time alone, if the pensive look on her face was anything to go by. So, he nods and accepts the blanket, it’s not like he’s not tired anyway. 

Before he forgets, he shrugs off his jacket and hands it to Clarke. “It’s cold of a night,” he explains with a shrug. “I’ve got a blanket this time, this should at least get rid of some of the chill.”

“Thank you,” she murmurs in surprise, taking the jacket gingerly. He lays down and closes his eyes hoping he’ll wake up somewhere else but knowing that he won’t.

*

At some point in her life she was told to put away her dolls and her silly notion of fairy tales, told to sit up straight and expected to stay quiet and say sensible things. At some point she was expected to leave her imagination far away, locked into a box to be forgotten and gather dust. To be a grown-up with grown-up ambitions and start thinking of a real future, not some make-believe land she would never find. 

But sitting here in front of a blue-green fire and surrounded by myths and tales, a land of beauty and danger she wonders what use that was, why when she hit a certain age she was no longer allowed an imagination when worlds beyond her comprehension really do exist. 

Above, there’s no moon to keep track of the night, and dawn doesn’t happen like it does at home, so it’s hard to tell when a good halfway point through the night is to wake Bellamy up. Probably when she can’t keep her eyes open any longer. Which may be a while off yet since her mind is still reeling with all the information she got from Niylah. 

There’s a pot of berries she foraged on the floor next to her, and a particularly sneaky tree root that keeps trying to steal it she’s keeping an eye on. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she can’t believe that’s an issue she’s having, the roots trying to steal her food. She picks a berry blindly and winces at the sourness, by the time she’d settled enough to start foraging she only had the light of the fireflies to guide her looking through the bushes. 

Niylah had told her that it was hard to accidentally eat something poisonous, they were more distinctive and would start stinging her fingers before she could eat it, so that was reassuring. Still, she was cautious when she ate the berries, a little caution never hurt anyone.

If only she’d had some caution when she picked up that damn book. How was she to know what would happen, never in her wildest dreams would she have thought a passage in an old book would lead to all of this. 

But it did, and she’s got to do her best to get the hell out of here. There’s one thing that she can’t get out of her head though.

_Face your demons._

How the hell was she supposed to do that? The final test – that’s what Niylah had called it – was about facing her demons, but if she was being honest with herself, she didn’t think she was strong enough for that. Bellamy might be – Bellamy is, she knows he is. He always has been, so she hopes the test didn’t rely on both of them passing. 

A chill goes through her and she pulls Bellamy’s jacket further around her. Somehow it still smells like him after being washed. Not that she’d spent that much time smelling him.

Bellamy’s never really been kind to her, so the past few days have thrown her completely. She’s not sure what to expect if they both get out, will things go back to normal, or have they bonded?

She jumps when Bellamy sits on the floor next to her, somehow managing to sneak up on her. 

“Sorry,” he mutters “I didn’t mean to make you jump.”

Clarke waves her hand dismissively “Don’t apologise, I’m supposed to be on lookout, not sitting here overthinking.”

He’s quiet for a long while before he says, “It’s kind of hard though, isn’t it – not overthinking here when there’s so much going on.”

She nods in agreement but doesn’t say anymore. Instead, she passes him the cup of berries and smiles when his lip curls up and he winces.

“They’re sour, aren’t they,” she half smiles. He gives her a sideways glance, but there's a hint of a smile now in the darkness.

“Could have warned me before,” he snorts.

“I could have,” she agrees “but then I’d have missed out on your reaction.”

He grins and looks down towards the fire, face illuminated in the eerie glow.

“You can get some rest if you like, I don’t think I’ll sleep anymore.” He murmurs, not looking at her.

“I’m not tired,” she shrugs “I’ve always been a night owl.”

He nods, “I know.”

She doesn’t ask how he knows, or why. She doesn’t think of him ever paying any attention to her, because that would get her hopes up that he might like her too. So, she sits in the silence and stares into the depth of the flames, unnatural to her but maybe here it’s normal, something she’ll have to get used to.

If she can’t face her demons, this world will be her new normal. It’s a concept that petrifies her, but deep down she’s accepted. Now she wonders what tale she will become – the failure that pushed away everybody that tried to help her to carve a path that would lead to her eventual demise. 

Her mother was right, she was never cut out to be an artist. Her dreams of her artwork being shown in galleries should have stayed like that – a dream. There’s nothing wrong with it being a hobby, but she should have stuck with a path less ambitious, she should have listened to her mother and gone down the boring route. Become a doctor, get married, buy a house with a picket fence and fill it with children and live out her days in a mundane haze.

No, that life was not for her. Even now, knowing it would have saved her from whatever hell she’s about to go through, she knows she’d take this over a life she wouldn’t really be living. 

“Clarke,” Bellamy sighs, she looks over to where he’s staring at her, softer than she’s used to. “Get some sleep, I’m sure the suns will be waking you up soon enough.”

She shrugs off his jacket and hands it to him back with a grateful smile and goes to bury herself under the blanket on the floor and prepares herself for whatever fresh hell tomorrow will bring.

+

She wakes to birdsong and a soft glow of the suns rising. The floor was surprisingly comfortable, or she was so exhausted she’d sleep soundly on a forest floor. She sits and stretches then looks around for Bellamy.

He’s scouting around the bushes, her drawings in hand looking closely at each berry. She smiles at the concentration on his face, the set of his jaw and his brows furrowed as he turns a berry between his fingers.

“That one’s poisonous,” she calls, Bellamy drops the berry like it’s burnt him. She laughs and shakes her head. “I’m joking, you’ll know if it’s poisonous when you pick it.”

“That wasn’t funny” he frowns.

“It was a bit. Anything of interest happen while I was asleep?”

“Nope,” he goes back to the berries, picking a few and puts them into the cup she was using last night. “The trees tried to steal our supplies, but I feel like that’s just the way it is now.”

“At least at home it was just Jasper trying to steal food, and he was harder to fend away.”

Bellamy snorts and shakes his head “true.”

She looks at the berries he’s collected already, and he’s done well – better than she had last night but he had the light to work with. At least, that’s what she tells herself. 

“I did some digging,” Bellamy rubs the back of his neck looking bashful down at the floor. “From your notes and found some vegetables – or whatever they are. They’re cooking over the fire.”

“Oh,” she blinks, more impressed than she expected to be. “That’s really good, thank you.”

“I don’t know how good they’ll be, they’re just boiled.”

“Any food’s good right now.”

As it turns out, the vegetables aren’t bad, they just taste a little bit like dirt. But still, at least they’re not walking all day on an empty stomach, and she boiled enough water last night to fill the water canisters for the day, so they set off, walking through the weeping forest as the suns slowly make their way together. 

The forest thins out and Clarke's ears don’t ring as much. They walk alongside a river, glimmering in the orange brilliance of the suns yet still it flows a deep blue. 

They walk a little closer together, not because they have to, but because there’s less animosity now, they’re closer – the only way they’re going to get through this is together. 

This part of the forest is otherworldly, calmer now the trees are sparse and birds sing and swoop freely here. Clarke wonders what’s next on their route, who’s selling them cons. It doesn’t take long to find out, in the distance looms a magnificent tower, ivy climbs up and wraps itself around the polished bricks. Bellamy looks over to her to quirk an eyebrow.

“You think this is our con artist?”

She snorts, “looks more like a princesses tower to me.”

“I bet you’d fit in well here then” Bellamy smirks. It was the nickname he’d given her when they first met, never said with affection though. Now she blushes when she thinks of how he looked at her in the nightgown Niylah had given her. 

The tower only seems to get taller as they approach it, looming intimidatingly over them as they stand at the bottom. It looks unaffected by time, bricks still immaculate and ivy lush and green. It’s literally an ivory tower and once again Clarke is amazed by the magic this strange new land holds.

“Rapunzel Rapunzel let down your hair” Bellamy shouts up to a faraway window. Clarke laughs until the window opens and a flash of Blonde hair appears.

“Do I look like Rapunzel?” A shrill voice screeches down to them. They stand agape staring up until the voice shouts again “Well, are you coming up or what?”

Bellamy sighs and drags a hand down his face. “Why is nothing straight forward?”

“Oh come on” Clarke grins, “It’s a princess in an ivory tower, tell me you don’t want to check this out.”

“I don’t want to check this out.”

Clarke huffs, half a laugh and half frustrated. “Well you go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

He gives her an incredulous look and scoffs “If you think I’m letting you go up there alone you’ve got another thing coming.”

She wants to comment that she didn’t think he cared enough about what happens to her, but she leaves it be and walks around to the wooden arched door. 

The stairways dark and spirally, Clarke’s out of breath before they’re even halfway up. Bellamy – of course – is unaffected by the exercise. 

“Struggling, Princess?” He smirks from behind her. Great, _that_ nicknames back.

“No” she lies, but it's useless, she’s out of breath already.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s only a couple of hundred more steps.”

Clarke groans but carries on until finally, they reach the top, a white door painted with pink flowers and vines and a gold handle that shines despite the lack of light. The door swings open before she gets a chance to open it herself.

A woman no older than herself stands in the doorway, lips twisted in a smirk and dark blonde hair twisted between her fingers. “I thought you were never coming up” she grins catlike as she steps to the side and gestures for them to come in.

The room doesn’t seem as obviously enchanted as the others they’ve been in, there’s no moving nick-knacks or softly moving rocking chair. Instead, the room’s filled with mirrors and self portrait paintings, bathed in a red and green tint.

“It’s been a while since there was fresh meat here.” She continues, picking up a whiskey glass and taking a sip. “It gets a little lonely up here by myself.”

“I’m sure it does” Clarke murmurs, stepping further into the room, it seems to extend in different angles, maybe it’s the mirrors, but she somehow doubts it.

“Drink?” the woman’s suddenly behind her holding a whiskey glass filled with red juice.

“Oh,” Clarke takes the drink and smells it suspiciously, it’s disarmingly sweet. “What is it?”

“It’s Jo juice, of course,” she taps Clarkes arm like she’d made a joke. “I named it after myself.”

“Of course you did,” Bellamy mutters next to her, glass in hand.

The woman drops into an armchair and beams up at them “Josephine Lightbourne, nice to meet you.”

“I’m Clarke, and this is Bellamy.” Josephines eyes flit briefly to Bellamy but stay predominantly on Clarke. The scrutiny makes her uncomfortable, but she doesn’t show it. She wanders to a row of mirrors, theres something strange about them, but she can’t quite put her finger on it. Between the gap in the mirror is a large double bed, a colourful Mandala bed spread draped over.

“Your clothes are so interesting; I don’t think _jeans_ were ever for me.” Josephines still staring at Clarke like she’s a meal, she turns away to look at the portraits on the canvases, all the same, all of Josephine smirking right at her. “I got the whole women wearing trousers and liberation and whatever, but man the sixties was just the best for fashion, the miniskirts and the dresses – god I was such a hippy. Woodstock was amazing though, not that I remember much of it.”

“I’m sorry – the sixties?” Clarke wheels around to stare at her, she can’t be any older than she is by looks, maybe even younger – how the hell had she lived here through the sixties?

“Mm-hmm” Josephine nods with a coy smile. “It was the best. I came here in ‘72, it looked like it could have been fun, but the hairstyles were going a bit - ugh.”

How old was this land? Could it be as old as their world, or older? What stories were left behind and what remained?

She takes a sip of the Jo juice then coughs and winces. “Jesus this tastes like gasoline.”

“Yeah, it takes some getting used to” Josephine shrugs, she doesn’t seem overly bothered by it, and Clarkes drank worse, so she perseveres.

“So, what’s with the ivory tower?” Bellamy asks, scrutinising one of the paintings.

Josephine sighs heavily and leans back in her chair, fingers going back to her hair. “When I got stuck here, I started to – let’s say dabble in the dark magic here. There’s a lot you can do once you know how, anyway – I love this body, but it can a bit samey, you know? So, I went and found the cooky witch trying to bring her husband back and stole her spell book. The spell was pretty simple actually, to steal a soul and put it in another body, if you understand Latin, that is. It’s a shame I messed up the translation for Luna, does her husband still do that godawful wailing?”

Out of everything she’s seen so far, this has disturbed her the most. She can’t respond to anything Josephines just told her, and by the expression on Bellamy’s face, he can’t either.

“You’re a body snatcher?” Clarke deadpans, still unable to really comprehend what she was saying. Enchanted cabins, witches in hovels and poisonous meadows were one thing, but the woman sat in front of her stole souls with no remorse.

Josephine rolls her eyes “I _was_ a body snatcher, don’t be so judgey about it. It’s not like I do it anymore, Gabriel put a stop to that when he lost his taste for it. He cursed me and locked me in this tower for eternity.”

 _This is real,_ Clarke thinks suddenly, magic and curses, this is real and not at all the sweet fairytales she’d built up in her head.

“What happened to the bodies you used?” Bellamy asks quietly, or maybe it was loud and the buzzing in her ears was overpowering his voice. She feels sluggish, her mind was slow and her movements felt heavy and lethargic. The glass in her hand seems to vibrate, or maybe she’s shaking.

“When I got bored and fresh meat came along, I left them to the trees.” With a flick of her hand, the window swings open and the cries of the trees fill the room. A deep chill goes through her, the crying trees were once people, it was their souls that were screaming.

 _Fresh meat,_ that’s what Josephine had called them when they’d got there.

Josephine stands and saunters to the middle of the room, with her, the mirrors come to life, swooping and spinning into place so they surround her. Bellamy grips her wrist and pulls her to the back of the room, the room spins around her, but she moves with him anyway. When their backs hit the wall, he doesn’t let go of her wrist.

The reflections that cast back are not Josephine, each mirror shows a different body, a new face that undoubtedly once held her soul.

Now they were left for the trees to consume.

“You know, if I wasn’t cursed, I’d have taken your body.” Josephine simpers, and the mirrors shift to surround her and Bellamy.

But it’s not her reflection that stares back, it’s Josephines.

Clarkes glass smashes on the floor and Bellamy tugs on her arm, pulling her back towards the door but she feels like she’s moving in slow motion, her body won’t respond to what her minds trying to tell it. Her vision blurs but Bellamy’s hand on her wrist keeps her anchored and guides her out.

“You’ll be back,” Josephine cackles “nobody can face their demons, you’ll come back.”

The spiralling staircase seems to stretch on for an eternity, they’re too narrow for them both to go down together so Bellamy goes first, which she’s grateful for.

When they burst out into the sweltering heat, the light burns her eyes and her legs want to give out, but Bellamy doesn’t let her give up, he winds an arm around her waist and pulls her forward, as far away from the tower as her legs will let her.

She feels as though her legs are about to give in when Bellamy stops dead and turns sharply to her. Panic rises now, it crashes down what happened, her mind finally comprehending what just happened.

“Are you okay?” Dark eyes bore into her, she’s suffocating.

“The mirrors – they were – that wasn’t – I don’t know what happened.”

He doesn’t answer, she’s not sure he can. Instead he wraps his arms tightly around her and she hugs back, clinging to him for dear life.

“I know,” he soothes softly, hand moving to stroke her hair. If she wasn’t so shaken up about what had just happened, it might register how completely out of character this was for Bellamy, but then, maybe he needs comfort too. She has a habit of overlooking others feelings, especially where Bellamy’s involved – years of pushing aside her own feelings and replacing them with walls hasn’t made her a better person. They’re in this together now.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice won’t let her speak with confidence. “You didn’t want to go up there.”

“It’s okay.” It’s not. “You didn’t know.” She didn’t, how could she?

When he pulls back and brushes her hair from her face, he looks just as shook up as she is.

“That wasn’t your fault” he assures her, “none of this is, stop beating yourself up over it.”

She won’t. She can’t. She got them into this mess, she needs to get them out – and that won’t happen if they’re standing here.

“Let’s carry on,” she murmurs, taking a step back and looking up to the suns.

“We can rest for a bit, Clarke. It’s alright to be frightened, it’s okay to just take a minute to calm down.”

“Taking a minute won’t get us out of here.” She looks to him then, staring at her like she’s made of glass, just a fall away from breaking.

She won’t break. She can’t.

He nods and follows her lead, walking with her as the suns slowly come together.

When the world leaves the brilliant orange behind and engulfs them in red, they sit in silence. The twigs they’ve collected from the poor, helpless trees lay in a pile ready to be alight, it feels cruel now, knowing that they hold such sorrow.

But for them, it’s a necessary evil so she twists a stick between her hands, it burns her more than it burns the pile though. Wordlessly, Bellamy kneels beside her and wraps his arms around her, hands covering hers and guiding them until brilliant sparks and smoke signals they’ve achieved their goal.

Darkness falls over them and fireflies flash, Clarke can’t appreciate their beauty as much as she did before. Bellamy’s staring into the fire, the luminous flames illuminating his darkened features, processing the day more than she had. Clarke just wants to forget about it, forget the mirrors with changing reflections and heavy feeling in her head.

She wants it all to go away.

“Hey,” Bellamy says abruptly, “the book, it usually tells us something.”

“I don’t care.”

“Clarke” Bellamy sighs, but she gives him a hard look to stop him saying anymore.

“I said I don’t care. I just want to forget about today.”

He nods and doesn’t say anymore. Clarke pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them, letting herself get lost in the flames.

“Go to sleep Clarke,” Bellamy’s voice finally pulls her back to reality. He passes her the blanket from the backpack with a meaningful glance, he isn’t asking her to go to sleep, he was telling her and she’s not fighting him on this. So, she takes the blanket with a nod and lies down in front of the fire.

“Wake me up when you need to go to sleep” there’s a doubtful look in his eyes that she doesn’t try and decipher, she just closes her eyes and lets the exhaustion take over.

She dreams of reflections that aren’t her.

When she looks down at her hands, they don’t look like hers, yet they move like hers do, they respond to her like her own would.

Her clothes aren’t hers, either. A long tie dye skirt that flows in the wind that sends a chill through her. She expects to be be in the tower again, but when she looks up the mirrors are gone and she’s standing back in the meadow. It doesn’t burn her this time as she runs her hands along the wildflowers.

Ahead, Josephine smirks with her hair twisted around her fingers. “I told you this body snatching thing was fun once you started.”

She jolts awake with her heart beating an erratic rhythm and a lightening sky. Bellamy hadn’t woken her up.

The sky wasn’t what woke her up though, or even her dream. The sound she thought washer heart beating was hooves, pounding the ground and getting closer to them. Bellamy gives her a weary look as they stand to attention, wondering what new kind of misery they’re going through this time.

A knight rides up to them, clad in leather pants and chain mail, their white horse looks larger than the ones she’s seen at home, but then, nothing is the same here than what it is at home.

The horse whinnies and jolts to halt when the knight pulls on the reigns, stopping in front of them and looking down through their helmet. Bellamy steps forward slightly, stepping in front of her and creating a barrier between her and the knight.

The knight dismounts, and Clarke wonders if this could literally be their knight in shining armour come to save them. But then, it may not be. This whole place has warped her ideas of the fairytales she believed to be idyllic and sweet.

The knight takes off their helmet and shakes out their hair – long and straight falling well past her shoulders. Green eyes meet hers and a hint of smile when she says, “You’re new here.”

 _Please,_ Clarke thinks in hope, _please let her be kind, please let her show us the way out and let this nightmare be over._

“Yes,” Clarke sighs, in front of her, Bellamy’s still tense in front of her. “And we’d really appreciate it if you’d show us how to get the hell out of here.”

“You’re in luck,” the knight smiles, but her eyes narrow in a way that unsettles Clarke and makes her stomach twist – but still, what choice did they have? They needed all the help they could get here. As long as it’s not Josephine in disguise. “The end is closer than you think.”

Their knight – Lexa, as she introduces herself – guides them through the forest with the promise that the end is closer than they think. Clarkes not sure how close she thought the exit was, but as they walk further into the denser part of the forest, the suns seem to be getting further away from each other.

“The suns,” she points out to Lexa, “They’re getting further away, shouldn’t they be getting closer together?”

Lexa turns to frown at them, “Who told you that?”

“Luna, she said the closer we get to leaving the closer the suns get to each other. They’re moving further away now.”

“Luna was sent mad when Derrick died, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about” Lexa dismisses and continues walking, not stopping to check if they were following. Bellamy doesn’t comment, but his hands clench into fists and she can see that he’s thinking it too, he knows that there’s something not right with where she’s leading them.

The further away the suns get, the more antsy it makes both of them. Lexa doesn’t seem to pay any attention to them, but theres a feeling in the pit of her stomach that tells her that something’s not quite right here.

“So, what happens once we get there?” Bellamy questions, she’s known him long enough to hear that he’s not just asking a question, he’s being deliberate in his questioning, looking for any dishonesty. He doesn’t trust her either. “Everybody tells us of a test and facing our demons, but nobodies told us exactly what that means.”

Lexa pauses and her shoulders tense, but she carries on ahead of them. “It’s best for you to find out yourselves.”

“No,” Bellamy grits out, jaw clenched in frustration. He stops abruptly and holds onto Clarke’s arm to stop her too. “We want answers, and you seem to want us to follow you as much as we want to get out. What are you gaining from us following you?”

“You want to know what you’ll face at the end?” Lexa wheels around to glare at them, the venom in her eyes shocks Clarke as much as the outburst. “Every terrible thing you’ve ever thought about yourself comes back to you and spits in your face, every demon you’ve ever had to face is there to tear you down until you’re nothing but a shell of the person you used to be. If you can’t overcome that then you’re stuck here and reduced to nothing more than a story nobody thinks about anymore, forced to live out everyday in an inferno of sins. Believe me when I say that I am doing you a favour.”

They stand dismayed and frozen in horror; the only way out is do the one thing she spends her life hiding from. She doesn’t think she can make it out, she can’t face her deepest fears.

“What do you mean you’re doing us a favour?” Bellamy demands, while Clarke’s still too shocked to speak.

“I’m taking you to your end, that’s what you want, isn’t it?” Lexa turns from them without waiting for answer, storming further into the woods. “We’re close, come on before the suns fade.”

Clarke’s not sure they’ve been walking long enough for the suns to be facing yet, but then, they’ve only been here a couple of days, Lexa’s been here longer, so surely, she knows better.

Something in her guts saying she’s walking into a trap, but what proof other than a witch in a hovel telling her about the suns does she have? Her legs seem to move by their own volition, and by the frustrated and confused look on Bellamy’s face, he’s doing the same.

Her feeling could be wrong, Lexa could be leading them to the final test, she hopes it’s wrong. Somehow, she doesn’t think it is though.

The door seems to appear out of nowhere, covered in moss and ivy climbing around it. Maybe this is it, maybe this is their final test. Lexa bangs twice on the door with her fist, it clangs and echoes, not like the wooden door they walked through to get here, this sounded heavy and metal, solid and out of place in the forest.

“I brought you what you asked,” Lexa announces to the door, and fear grips Clarke. “We had a deal.”

Deal? Surely it’s their right to leave, why did Lexa have to make a deal for it?

A slit in the door opens and unnatural yellow eyes look through. “They have not yet taken the test?”

“No,” Lexa confirms “their hearts hold no weight.”

“Then we have a deal.” The slit closes and door creaks open, a figure in a dark cloak appears, face covered by a hood but there’s still something outlandish about them. Lexa strides through the door past him, paying no attention to them left on the outside.

The figure gestures for them to walk through, Bellamy gives her an uneasy glance but goes forth anyway. She’s about to go too, but something catches her eye on Lexa’s horse. Sheathed in leather is a dagger, small enough to conceal and when she pulls it out, its sharp enough to do some damage.

But god she hopes she doesn’t have to use it.

Nobody sees her take the dagger, so she slips it into her sock under her jeans and follows Bellamy.

The cell they’re led to is dark and dank, the walls seem to weep and the dampness in the air hurts her chest.

This isn’t the final test, it can’t be.

She sits with her legs curled up to her chest and Bellamy’s arm pressed against her, the heat from him is comforting, they’re still alive – for now.

The figure comes to the cell doors again, uncloaked this time, and when the light hits them Clarke recoils in horror. Their skin is covered in green luminous scales, cracking and peeling along their face and hands. Yellow eyes stare soullessly at them, narrow and calculating.

“What do you want from us?” Bellamy demands, voice stronger than hers would possibly be.

“Only your blood” the figure snarls, voice deep and throaty. “The witch cursed me and turned my heart to dust. The only way to keep it beating is to use the blood of those who have not yet faced their demons. They’re few and far between these days, but you two will last me a while.”

 _No chance,_ Clarke thinks to herself. _No way am I going out without a fight._

She thinks this is it, one of them are going to be led to their death, but the figure turns and walks away. Clarke lets out the breath she didn’t know she was holding and deflates against the sticky wall.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, the weight of her actions finally laying heavy on her. They could die here, and it would be all her fault. “I never meant for this to happen, I never meant to put you in danger.”

“Clarke stop apologising, this isn’t your fault,” Bellamy sighs, turning towards her and putting a hand on her shoulder, demanding for her to look at him. “You didn’t know, okay? I don’t blame you for any of this, I’m not holding it against you.”

“You should,” she blinks, willing herself not to cry. “It’s just another thing i’ve fucked up. I only went looking for a damn lightbulb.”

“You’re not a fuck up, this could have happened to anyone, it has happened to lots of others. This isn’t on you.”

Maybe so, but that still didn’t alleviate the crushing guilt. It didn’t change what she was about to do. Whether she’d perish with it too was a different matter, but she had to give Bellamy a fighting chance, he deserved to get back to his life.

“Bellamy, if anything happens –”

“Nothing is happening. We’re getting out of here.” He tells her vehemently, eyes shining bright in the dimness of the cell. Oh, if only he new how brilliant he really was.

“If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know if I would have tried this hard to get out of this place. But you deserve to go back, you have what it takes to get out. You’re brilliant, if anybody can make it out, it’s _you,_ so do it.”

He shakes his head as a tear falls down her cheek, cutting through the dirt and grime of the day. He brushes it away with his thumb – he won’t miss her when she’s gone.

“Clarke I –” he’s cut off by the cell door creaking open, their captor stands grotesque and hunched, staring through them with yellow eyes. His gaze moves to Bellamy and Clarke’s heart clenches.

“Who’s first?” He croaks, Bellamy shifts away from her, read to sacrifice himself. She can’t let him do that.

She feels the blade cut into her ankle as she slides it out of her sock, blood runs hot and sticky into her shoe, but she doesn’t think about it – it’s nothing compared to what’s about to happen. She stands before Bellamy gets chance to, stepping in the way of his path. The dagger’s cold and heavy in her hand, pressed against her thigh in poor concealment.

“Me,” she announces, stepping towards him. A scaly hand reaches out to grip her wrist, rough and cold his nails dig into her skin, drawing blood in crescents around her wrist. Sickly eyes bore into hers a predatory smile spreads across his flaky lips.

“I wish I could tell you this will be over quick,” he says, though his tone gives no indication that that’s true. The look in his eyes say that he wants her to suffer.

“Clarke,” Bellamy breathes from behind her, theres a shuffle of him standing behind her “don’t, please.”

Logically, she knows he means _don’t sacrifice yourself,_ but for a brief moment her hand loosens on the dagger until yellow eyes narrow at her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, completely insincerely “but this has to be done.”

“I’m sorry too,” she whispers. She doesn’t expect the blade to slice through the scales of his neck as easily as it does. His skin seems to tear more than it does slide or cut, but still - brown, stagnant blood sprays over her, a wretched smell drenches her face and clothes as he crumbles to the floor. There’s not body to present the crime she’s just committed, just a pile of dust and two rolling yellow eyes.

“I’m so sorry.”

The dagger drops to the floor with a sharp clatter and Bellamy grabs her arm and pulls her from the cell, navigating the maze of corridors for her. She’s stuck in a daze, not like the one after whatever Josephine did to her, but one that can’t quite comprehend the weight of what she’s done.

She’s taken a life. A life that will never torture another soul again – but it’s a life that has been taken at her hand none the less.

They burst into the forest with an orange glow that seems brighter than it was before. It burns her eyes and skin and illuminates the brown stains on her clothes and skin.

“What the hell was your plan there?” Bellamy demands, eyes wide and frightened – is he frightened of her now?

He should be.

“I don’t know,” she confesses in a whisper, broken and torn.

“What if that didn’t work? What then? He’d have killed you.”

“He was going to kill me anyway, you too. I was hoping It would have at least created a distraction so you could run.”

He softens then, shoulders deflating “You really thought I would have left without you? Knowing you were in danger?”

“I don’t know, I just knew I had to get you out.”

“Oh, Clarke,” he pushes the hair out of her face, matted in blood and sticky. “Come on.”

He leads her down to a lake, sparkling blue and freezing as her skin makes contact with it. It’s welcome though, the shock reminds her she’s still alive.

 _He_ wasn’t though. The crocodile man – he was a pile of dust, rotting in a cell.

When they’re waist deep, she plunges under the water, it feels like ice surrounding her, but she pushes past it, desperate to get the putrid smell off of her. Brown blood swirls in the water as she scrubs it from her hair, but still she doesn’t feel clean.

When she comes up for air blood still stains her shirt, so she pulls it over her head, paying no attention to Bellamy standing aghast in front of her. She wrings and scrubs the shirt under the water, desperate for the blood to just disappear, desperate for the memories of this place to fade.

“Clarke stop” Bellamy instructs softly, prying the shirt out of her hands. It’s only then she realises she’s crying – no, sobbing. Her entire body shakes with it, convulses and screams out for some sort of relief. Bellamy wraps his arms around her pulls her in close, theres nothin she can but cling to him and sob into his shirt.

What a sight she must be, standing waist deep in a lake sobbing into Bellamy wearing nothing but a bra and blood-soaked jeans, now a murderer.

It doesn’t matter the intentions of the act, she is now a murderer, by no means did she ever intend to become one.

Bellamy’s murmuring soothingly to her, his jacket now wrapped around her in an attempt to save her dignity and fend off the cold.

He pulls her from the lake and sits her down, starting a fire and draping a blanket over the jacket around her shoulders.

There’s a loud, fraught silence that Bellamy finally breaks when the sky turns red.

“You know you’ve saved countless other lives, right?”

It breaks her out of the fog that clouds her mind, “What?”

“He was killing people who hadn’t taken the test yet, those people had a chance to go home stole from them. He would have carried on too if it wasn’t for you.”

She blinks dumbfounded at him, “it doesn’t change the fact that I murdered him.”

“It was kill or be killed, you took one life to save countless others.” He moves to sit next her, arm winding around her shoulders and letting her lean into him. It was only then that she realised how cold she was. Grateful for the added heat, she lets exhaustion take over when the fireflies flash into life.

When she wakes, she’s entirely too close to Bellamy. It’s an alien thing, when just a few days ago in a different realm they were bickering over anything and everything, now they’re a team. What’s stranger still, is that she’s enjoying his company. Gone are the quips and mean comments, he’s soft now – caring and free from judgment, she likes him in an entirely different way to what she did before.

It won’t last. If they ever get out of here, she’s sure it won’t last.

But god, she hopes it does. Going back to how they were would kill her now.

It’s still dark, Bellamy’s staring deep into the fire, unaware that she’s awake so she takes a moment to just watch him. What a strange notion, that she killed for him. She had little regard for her own life, she made her bed when she walked through the door that led her here, but Bellamy had followed her, making it her responsibility to get him home.

She wonders how he feels about that, though. Did he want somebody to lose their life in his name?

Probably not. But it’s done now, no matter her regrets, or the what ifs, she cannot change the past.

“Bellamy,” she murmurs, pulling him out of his trance. There’s so much she wants to say right now, so much she should say to him but settles on “You should get some sleep.”

Although reluctant, he nods his head in a true testament to how exhausted he must be. He hadn’t slept the night before, so the least she can do is let him sleep undisturbed now.

When daylight comes he wakes, and her heart is lighter than it was the day before. That dreadful day is over, there is nothing to do but put it behind her and get back on the right track for getting home.

She’s grateful when the next day brings no hindrances. They follow the suns guidance and dig for vegetables when they get hungry. They don’t speak of the day before, it’s just a painful memory they’ll both push away.

Night falls and they take it turns sleeping, closer than they used to but Bellamy seems for protective now, always leading, always on the alert for new dangers. She lets him take first sleep to try and get him to have some proper rest, but it doesn’t last long - he’s awake and alert after a couple of hours and Clarke knows that there’s convincing him to go back to sleep, so she takes her rest gratefully and accepts that’s the way it will probably be.

Nightmares plague her though. Blood, hot and sticky covers her, even in the icy cold water it won’t come off. She’s stained for life, now everybody will look at her and know what she’s done.

She wakes with a jolt to Bellamy frowning down at her. It’s still dark, so can’t have slept for long. But she’s not tired anymore, so it was enough.

“Go back to sleep, Bellamy” she sighs as she sits up, taking a place in front of the fire.

“You should try and get some more rest; it’s going to be another long day tomorrow.”

Clarke just shakes her head. “I’m fine – just get some rest.”

Bellamy considers her for a moment, then nods and makes his way to the blankets she was just sleeping on.

When he’s asleep, she braves opening the backpack and digging through for the book. Her fingers trace over the gold engraved lettering on the cover. _Pugna Daemones Tuos –_ fight off your demons.

Maybe it’s not a test at the end where they have to actually face their demons, maybe this place is designed to be the demons. Maybe this is the test, maybe getting through this land unscathed is the way out.

But maybe not.

She flicks through the pages until Josephines tower appears – she’s hanging out the window, hair blowing in the breeze and the mirrors glistening behind her.

_Up high in the sky lives a pretty trickster,_

_For a change of body comes from her elixir._

_With each body she takes a soul is sold,_

_Another story never to be told._

_When her love lost his taste,_

_The curse placed upon her keeps her in place._

The thought of the ‘jo juice’ Josephine gave her still makes her dizzy, is that what the bodies she stole felt before?

She blanches at thinking of them as just bodies, they were people – real, tangible people who had lives outside of here, just trying to get back to them now they cry in the breeze.

Flicking the page over, Lexa’s there on her white horse. Clarke scoffs, how foolish she was to think that she would lead them to their salvation, instead she led them to a trap, she made Clarke a murderer.

_In this place no redemption can be found,_

_To get away there is no easy way around._

_This knight in shining armour will sell you a con,_

_To save her people she will do what has to be done._

_Many have lost their lives to the cursed frail man,_

_To keep his rotten heart beating he’ll do all he can._

On the other page, _he’s_ there, with his crocodile skin and foreboding eyes boring into her. Even now, he’s staring at her like he knows what she’s done, he’s just a drawing but he’s screaming _you killed me._

She slams the book shut and shoves it back into the backpack. The suns are rising now, bathing the world in a pink glow.

“I thought you didn’t care?” Bellamy’s voice makes her jump, she turns to where he’s half sat up on the blanket, smirking playfully at her.

“You should know by now my morbid curiosity always gets the better of me” she smiles ruefully back, turning back to the dying fire. “We should probably get ready, if we’re going to cover as much ground as yesterday.”

“yeah,” he agrees quietly, standing and stretching. Clarke looks away when his shirt rises and exposes a band of tanned skin. She shouldn’t be blushing at then, when she had carelessly taken her off her shirt without giving his presence a second thought.

They pick berries as they go, it’s not substantial but it does for a travelling snack. When they decide they can’t live off berries any longer, they search for vegetables and dig them up, Bellamy starts a fire as Clarke cleans them.

“I don’t suppose Niylah told you of any herbs dotted about, the taste of dirt is getting a bit old now” Bellamy smiles, Clarke snorts.

“Sorry but no, unless you want to be the guinea pig I suggest you get over your aversion to dirt.” She flicks the dirt from her fingers at him, it lands on his cheek and he looks up unamused, staring her dead in the eyes.

“I know you didn’t just flick _dirt_ on me, Clarke” he deadpans.

“I didn’t”

“Good,” he nods turning back to the fire. “Neither did I”

He’s fast, she’ll give him that. She didn’t see the flick of his hand or the dirt flying towards her face, but she feels it land on her cheek and over her mouth. “Seriously?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

She wipes the dirt away and spits out the bit that got in her mouth. “Oh it’s on” she scoops up a handful of dirt but Bellamy’s quicker, diving towards her and pinning her arm to her side.

“No chance,” he grins, and suddenly he’s closer than he’s ever been, face just inches from her and her hearts beating erratically – so loud she wonders if he can hear it too. By the way his eyes darken, its not just her who’s affected. His other hand lifts to her face, thumb brushing over her lip. “You missed a spot,” he explains quietly, “Right there.”

Her eyes flicker to his lips as his tongue darts out momentarily and for a second, she gets an impulse to just lean forward. It would be easy; he thinks so too when his head tilts slightly.

Until the flutter of wings interrupts them. Not like the fireflies of a night, this was louder – the wingspan was bigger, and close now. Bellamy’s eyes widen in fear and they both turn to see what could possibly be going on now.

Somehow, everyday here she see’s the impossible brought to life, yet she’s still amazed by the new wonders she’s faced with. In front of her, in blinding glory is a girl, young and impossibly beautiful with great golden wings shimmering under the glowing suns. She smirks and cocks her head at them, unabashed curiosity sparkling in her turquoise eyes.

“Hello” Clarke blinks in amazement. The girl grins back at her and wings flutters.

“If you have me, you want to share me. If you share me, you haven’t got me. What am I?” Her voice is high and playful, Bellamy looks back to her in mirrored awe.

“I don’t know,” Clarke laughs, still amazed by what she’s seeing. The creature before her seems to stare into her very soul, never once has Clarke felt so exposed.

“A secret.”

The riddle seemed to be directed at her, for secrets she has. Her secret crush on Bellamy, for one, and the doubt that she’s getting out of here – not just doubt, in a way, she almost doesn’t want to go back to her ordinary life.

“Very good,” Clarke nods “who are you?”

The girl gives her a once over and a mocking look. “I’m a nymph, why – what else would I be?”

“I really don’t know,” Clarke laughs. “I don’t know much about this place.”

The nymph doesn’t respond, only looks between them with open inquisitiveness. She perches herself down on a boulder and raises an eyebrow at them, a challenge for them to make the next move.

“I don’t suppose you know how to get out of this place?” Bellamy asks, dropping his hand from her face and releasing her wrist. She misses the contact already.

“The more you take, the more you leave behind. What am I?” More riddles, Clarke wonders if that’s her main form of communication.

“A Nymph,” Bellamy mutters, Clarke pats his chest.

“I don’t know – please, we really just want to know how to get out of here.” Clarke tries, but a flash of anger distorts the Nymphs features.

“Answer the question,” she seethes, her wings fluttering red. “The more you take, the more you leave behind, what am I?”

“I don’t know!” Clarke cries, “I just want to get out of here.”

“The answer you seek is right here. The more you take, the more you leave behind, what am I?”

Clarke sighs, this is impossible. She was never any good at these before, let alone under pressure. “I don’t know, I give up.”

The nymph trills in victory, “Footsteps.”

“Of course. You’re saying we need to carry on walking to get out?”

“It’s not so bad, this land. Why would you want to leave?” The Nymph questions with genuine interest.

“Because we’re trapped here, and so far there’s been nothing particularly enticing about staying.” Clarke grumbles. The Nymph just grins back at her.

“A prison you feel safe in, yet never quite happy. Whenever you try to leave, it only grows bigger. What is it?”

“I swear to god,” Clarke mutters, “If you say this place…”

“Your comfort zone.”

“If you’re saying we should stay to expand our comfort zones,” Bellamy starts, “then it’s not really much of an excuse to stay.”

The Nymph once again doesn’t answer, just stares deep into them, like she’s ready to expose their secrets at a moments notice.

“Do you only speak in riddles?” Bellamy sighs, sounding as defeated as Clarke feels.

“You don’t like riddles? Then I’ll speak in rhymes – to leave this place new fears you will learn, but one of you will not return.”

Clarkes heart sinks as Bellamy stares in horror. The nymph laughs in great delight and with a quiver of her wings, she’s gone. Leaving them crushing under her prophecy.

“Well that was horrifying” Bellamy finally breaks the silence, giving her a wary look. “Funny, I don’t think I’m actually hungry anymore.”

Clarke had completely forgotten the vegetables she was cleaning, now abandoned on the floor. “No,” she murmurs. “Me neither.”

They collect up the vegetables, stopping for lunch seems like a pipe dream now as they continue on. The suns are getting closer and closer, like they might collide soon. They’re so close to the end, but with that brings so much uncertainty. It’s an uncertainty she doesn’t let herself think too much about anymore. Whatever will be will be.

If she gets stuck here, maybe she can become a nymph who only speaks in riddles, too. She’ll have to learn some first, though.

The woods get darker as they walk on, at any point the suns might merge and they’ll be left to their demons.

She’s beginning to think that the suns will start fading soon when they reach a blue-green lagoon, serene and beautiful, enticingly peaceful, they could probably make camp here for the night. Around the edge are striking white flowers that sway in the breeze.

Except – clouds swirl n the sky, dark and foreboding, they haven’t seen a single cloud since they got here, now they block out the suns and fill the sky with doom.

She’s about to question it as she turns to Bellamy, but the look on his face stops her dead in her tracks. He’s staring out to the lagoon in mystical wonder, like he’s had some sort of great epiphany.

“Do you hear that?” He murmurs in awe, maybe this is it, maybe this is the end and they’re about to take their final test – but she doesn’t hear anything, only a faint rumble from the clouds, but she’s sure that’s not what he’s talking about.

“Hear what? Bellamy, I don’t hear anything.” She’s looking back out to the lagoon, the water that was once calm is swirling lazily now, a slow whirlpool of shimmering light on its surface. Bellamy turns to her in confusion.

“The singing, how can you not hear the singing? It’s beautiful.”

There is no singing, none that she can hear anyway. The whirlpools picking up speed now, the middle dipping into an abyss and bubble rise at the surface.

“Bellamy, I think we should get out of here.” She says urgently, tugging on his wrist. He shakes her off, taking a step forward. “Bellamy no.”

There’s a figure rising now, long dark hair cascading down her shoulders and hand reaching out towards Bellamy. The water separates for her as she steps towards them, and Bellamy’s walking to meet her.

“No,” she tries to shout more urgently, but he’s stuck in a trance – eyes trained on the woman reaching to him. “Please, this isn’t right. Just come with me.”

He stops momentarily to stare at her in amazement “She’s calling me, can’t you hear it?”

“No, I can’t – so you need to just –” it’s useless, trying to fight with him, it’s like he’s been hypnotised. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s stepped into the water, doesn’t pay any attention to it getting deeper as he keeps on walking to the woman. “Please” she begs again, but to no avail. Theres a golden glow as he takes her hand and she leads him back towards the swirling water. Clarke rushes forwards, breaking through the water to cling to his arm for dear life.

“I can’t do this without you, Bellamy I need you.”

He’s not listening, whatever spell he’s under is consuming him. In one last attempt, she lets go of his arm and holds onto his face, forcing him to look at her. “I _need_ you.”

The woman changes then, her features contorting eyes flashing red, scales morph from her skin and pointed teeth bare at her as she hisses “He’s mine.”

“No” Clarke doesn’t flinch away from her; she’s faced one too many demons here to lose Bellamy to a siren. “He’s not, he’s coming with me.”

“Why don’t you let him make that decision” she hisses back at Clarke.

“Break the spell and we’ll ask him.”

“Clarke it’s fine,” Bellamy soothes in a voice that is not his own. “It’s going to be fine; this is where I’m supposed to be.”

“No it’s not, you’re supposed to be with me,” the words are more raw and leave her more exposed that she can ever recall being, but still it doesn’t break the spell. Instead, Bellamy’s pulls over and Clarke’s left with a heart wrenching ache in her chest. Without a second though, she pulls as much air into her lungs as she can and pulls herself under the water.

The first thing she notices, is the flash of a golden scaly tail swimming down into the abyss. Bellamy’s hovering, but it’s like he’s being anchoring by something. The siren swims in front of his, hand over his heart and pointed nails digging into his chest.

She’s not a strong swimmer, and by no means could she beat a siren, but she has to try, she can’t let them take Bellamy. So she surges forward and grips the hand over his chest, pushing the siren away. She turns and hisses at Clarke again, the mirage of a beautiful woman gone now, her true form shows and Clarke startles in horror. Cat like eyes bore into her in fury, she wasn’t used to being challenged like this.

“His soul is mine” she hisses. Even underwater her voice is clear. Clarke shakes her and holds onto Bellamy’s arm, trying to pull him up but he’s stuck – and she’s out of air. Out of options she pushes herself back up to the surface, she breaks it with a gasp and a splutter, dark clouds still loom over her.

She’s losing him, not now. With a gulp of air, she swims back down, Bellamy’s still floating there, skin ashen and grey, eyes closed as the siren circles him. Wrapped around his ankle is seaweed of sorts, if she can free him, they can get away.

This time when she goes down, the siren pays her no attention, too absorbed in whatever she’s doing to Bellamy.

The seaweed’s sharp and stings on on contact, but there’s no time to focus on that – she grips it and pulls with all her might until it snaps under her grasp. It gets the sirens attention; she swims down to Clarke with a graceful flick of her tail. A bony hand grasps Clarke’s face, pointed nails digging into her cheeks. She’s going to run out of breath soon.

“Stop fighting,” the siren hisses “men aren’t worth it.”

 _He is,_ she thinks, but since she can’t use her voice she kicks out leg, hitting the siren in the chest, then again in the face. With a hiss she realised Clarke isn’t giving up, and though she could easily overpower her, she decides it’s not worth it and swims away. Grabbing Bellamy under the arm, she gets them both to the surface as quickly as she can and splutters and coughs once she breaks through again.

Bellamy doesn’t make a sound though, with a panicked kick of her legs she drags him back to land. She’s relieved when he starts to cough and splutter when she rolls him onto his side. She lays exhausted next to him, the clouds are starting to clear, she takes that as a good sign at least.

“You look like you need a hand,” a voice calls from the distance. Clarke doesn’t think she can take anymore, the last person who offered to help screwed them over.

“We’re fine” Clarke waves them off as she rubs Bellamy’s back while he coughs up half the lagoon he was stuck in. There’s a man standing next to her then, casting a shadow over them.

“The siren got to him,” he states with a wince, Clarke hums in agreement, but doesn’t say anymore on the matter. “You’re lucky you got out with your lives.”

Clarke doesn’t respond, just waits for Bellamy calm. When he does, he rolls onto his back lifeless and out of breath, Clarke doesn’t know what to do to help him. She doesn’t know what the siren did to him or how long ago he lost consciousness.

“Here,” the man sighs, crouching down in front of them. He reaches out but Clarke flinches, trying to shield Bellamy from him she darts into front of him.

“Don’t” she warns, but she’s too late, he taps her temple and the world turns and distorts around her and suddenly, the glare of the suns and lapping of the water is gone, they’re under a cover with a mind dulling hum around them. It reminds her a bit of a grey circus tent, and wouldn’t that just be her luck? To be sold to the circus when they’re so close to getting out.

The ground is hard and cold here, Bellamy’s lay on a cot now, it dips slightly in the middle but it’s functional. She’s knelt next to it, still confused about how she got here, her mind in a daze. She puts a hand to Bellamy’s face, his skins cold and grey and she has no idea what to do next.

“He’ll warm soon enough, don’t worry.” The man tells her, passing a thick blanket over to her. Clarke hesitates, but her wariness isn’t going to help Bellamy right now, so she accepts it and drapes it over him.

“What do you want from us?” She asks weakly after a moments silence. The man frowns at her and shakes his head.

“I don’t want anything from you, I just want to help.”

She pauses, there is good in this world, she reminds herself. She can’t let herself become jaded by what happened with Lexa and the siren. The nymph’s warning still rings clear in her head, _one of you will not return._ She was so sure it was about her, but perhaps not.

“Is he going to be alright?” She asks quietly, it’s so out of character for her to be quiet and weak, but she just feels so helpless.

“He’ll be fine, he just needs rest. I think you got to him just in time.”

“It doesn’t feel like it. I shouldn’t have let him go.”

“Surely you must know there’s no way you could have stopped him. This isn’t sleeping beauty; true loves kiss won’t wake him up.”

Clarke huffs out a bitter laugh. “Good job, I doubt his true love is here.”

The man just quirks an eyebrow at her. “Ahh, unrequited love, hurts, doesn’t it?”

She laughs and shakes her head, not rising to it.

“I’m Gabriel, by the way.”

Gabriel – she’s heard that before, through a fog in her mind. “The same Gabriel that cursed Josephine?”

Gabriel laughs, jaded and a bit nervous. “You’ve met Josie then – yes, that was me. But before you judge me, I did it to save people coming through, it wasn’t just souls who had taken the test she was throwing away, it was new ones too, souls with a chance of getting out of here, I couldn’t let her rob their chances of survival.”

“I don’t judge you,” Clarke assures him quietly. “I killed the crocodile man, he was going to kill us for our blood, I couldn’t let him do that.”

“That was a brave thing to do” Gabriel contradicts every thought she had about the situation. She didn’t feel brave, she felt weak and hasty, there was probably a better way of getting out of there, she didn’t have to take his life. “It couldn’t have been easy for you, but he’s been terrorising these lands for far too long, you did everyone a favour.”

Clarke nods, but doesn’t reply, she doesn’t trust her voice right now. Instead, she strokes Bellamy’s hair back from his forehead, slightly too long now, but that doesn’t matter here. Blood smears on his forehead – bright red and fresh, it brings a wave of panic through her.

“You’re bleeding” Gabriel gasps, taking her hand to inspect it. It takes her a beat too long to realise that the blood was from her. “Did you touch the seaweed?”

She nods in response, she remembers the sting now as she pulled Bellamy free from it. “His leg,” she suddenly realises, crawling over to the end of the cot to pull his jeans leg up. Sure enough, theres a ring of blood around his ankle where the seaweed had bitten into him.

“I’ll get a bandage” Gabriel assures her, walking off around the tent. She bandages up Bellamy’s ankle when Gabriel passes him the roll of bandages, hoping its enough to stop the bleeding. It doesn’t seem to bleed through, so she sits back in relief.

“You should probably bandage up your hand too” Gabriel tells her, but clarke shakes her head.

“‘I’m fine” she hadn’t really looked at her own hands, she knows they’re not as bad as bellamy’s leg, she’ll live. Gabriel sighs in resignation and drags a stool next to the cot for her. She accepts it gratefully and takes Bellamy’s hand, willing him to wake up now.

The sky morphs into a red blaze, tinting the tent a with a red glow. She hopes to whatever gods are out there that this is the last night she has to see. “How far away from the end are we?”

“A couple of hours walk” Gabriel smiles when her eyes widen in shock “getting there is the easy part.”

“Are there anymore ventures along the way?”

“No, rest assured it’s just your demons left to face now.”

Clarke gives him a weary smile, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Everybody has to do it, if you want to get out that is.”

“I have to at least give Bellamy chance of getting out” she doubts still that shes got what it takes, but if she hasn’t, Bellamy might – no, Bellamy does.

The suns disappear completely outside, and a new glow appears – lanterns dotted around the room, but more like the ones she has at home. She leans forwards for a closer look – they can’t possibly be electric. Strips of solar panels sit on the top, it’s resourceful, and it gives her hope that there is a chance of survival here past magic, though Gabriel doesn’t seem to have a problem with dabbling in it every so often.

Out of curiosity, she pulls the book out of her backpack, what taunting rhyme will it throw at her now.

Sure enough, there on the page is the lagoon, water shimmers and rippling as the woman steps through it, on the other page, the siren who tried to take Bellamy away from her.

_Her lover’s life was taken in this lake,_

_To take revenge new souls she’ll take._

_The final hurdle to survive before the test,_

_Take up the warlock for much needed rest._

_When the suns collide your demons you’ll face,_

_Overcoming them is the key to leaving this place._

Yet another tragedy this land brings, Clarke thinks sadly. Another trying to steal souls. But more concerning, Gabriel must be right about how close to the end they are. Overcoming her demons may be easier said than done.

The night goes on, she can hear the fireflies outside, and the faint glow through the tent, but she has little desire to see them for what would hopefully be one last time. She has no desire to anything that would require her leaving Bellamy’s side until he’s awake and she can see that he’s fine.

At some point, Gabriel brings her food that she picks at, not really tasting it but knowing she hasn’t eaten all day, she’ll crash soon if she doesn’t get energy from somewhere.

Bellamy slowly starts showing sign of life, his skin flushes red from the weight of the blanket, occasionally he sighs in his sleep, and gradually, he becomes more and more restless until his eyes flicker open and glance around the room confused.

“Oh god,” he presses his hand to his forehead and winces, “What the hell happened?”

Clarke chokes out a relieved laugh, “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Was there a woman singing to me? And a mermaid?”

“That’s pretty much the gist of it, yeah.”

“This place just gets weirder by the day,” he sighs, trying to sit up, but with a wince he collapses back down .

“Well the good news is Gabriel said the end’s just a couple of hours walk from here.”

“What?” He looks around, as if suddenly realising they wasn’t outside anymore. “Who’s Gabriel? Where are we?”

“It’s okay – Gabriel found us after I pulled you out the lake, he’s helping us.”

“Like Lexa was trying to help us?” He asks harshly, accusation lacing his tone but she ignores it.

“I don’t think so, I think he just wants to help.” She assures him, but still she knows he has his suspicions.

“Ahh, you’re awake,” Gabriel interrupts, strolling over from where he’s wandered outside. Bellamy looks over him in distrust, but Gabriel seems to take no offence. “How are you feeling?”

“Like death warmed up” Bellamy grunts.

“That’s to be expected, but you’re still breathing - you’re lucky, not many make it past there.”

Bellamy blushes and glances over at Clarke, “I had some help.” Clarke ducks her head, not so much embarrassed but undeserving of praise – it was the least she could have done after she’d dragged him here.

Gabriel puts a jug of water and two glasses on a table by the cot. “That you did. It’s late, and you’ve got a long day ahead of you tomorrow. Get some rest.” He walks away, leaving them in silence.

Rest – that’s what they could both do with more than anything right now. But once again they’re faced with the conundrum of only having one bed, and she’s not going to turf him out after everything he’s been through today, she’ll happily sleep on the stool.

Sensing her dilemma, Bellamy slides over on the cot for her. “Come on,” he sighs, “You need sleep too – you look dead on your feet.”

“Technically I’m on a stool” he rolls his eyes playfully and she kicks her shoes off, they’ve already shared a bed once, and this is probably her last chance to be close to him – she may as well take the opportunity while she can.

She slips under the blanket and lays with her head next to his heart, reminding herself that he’s alive. They both are, whether it’s by some miracle or their own stubbornness to survive she doesn’t know – but she does know they’re both still breathing, and if Gabriels right tomorrow they’ll face their demons and determine their fate.

It’s not like last time in Niylah’s cabin where she was scared to moved from her side of the bed. Somethings shifted between them, theres an intimacy that wasn’t there before. The cot here is smaller than the bed they were on before, but it doesn’t feel like that, she’s not tense now, not worried about crossing a line.

She’s not sure what will happen if they both make it back, whether Bellamy will go back to being cold and detached from her, but for tonight she won’t think of that, tonight she’ll revel in the warmth of his arm around her waist, holding her close.

Just for tonight, she can play pretend.

“You saved me again,” he murmurs into her hair, voice soft and sweet.

“You saved me too,” she whispers into the night, letting the darkness take over.

*

Try as he might, sleep doesn’t come easy for him this time around. The blackness of the night when he closes his eyes is too much, overwhelmingly similar to the void that was his mind when the siren dragged him underwater.

He shudders at the thought, the cold dead feeling in his chest in still there, as are the fingernail marks over his heart. He still doesn’t know what came over him, there was a voice in his head screaming at him not to go, begging him to just stay – Clarke was begging him to stay with her, he wanted so desperately to listen to her but his body was detached, his voice wasn’t his own and when he spoke, the words foreign on his tongue.

He thinks of Clarke’s reflections then in Josephine’s mirrors. How detached she’d looked then, her eyes slow and unfocused, no doubt the effects of whatever Josephine had given her. Is that how she had felt? Disjointed from her body.

If it wasn’t for Clarke, he’d have been left down there to rot, soulless and alone. She’d risked her life once again to save him – though he’s not quite sure why.

He doesn’t think Clarke’s a bad person – he never really has, but he doesn’t understand her motives. Did she save him out of guilt, or a sense of duty? Or did she like him too? Whatever the reasons, she did it – and he’s forever indebted to her for that.

Curled up next to him, she stirs in her sleep, her arm moving to drape over her eyes. In the dim glow of the lanterns, he can see the cuts across her palms and fingers, fresh and deep, he wonders how she got them, but he’s sure he’ll find out soon enough. He runs his thumb in the space between the cuts and she sighs, relaxing into the touch as her arm drops again.

He tries to wait out the night, but it seems endless – now his legs are cramping and his back hurts. As much as he doesn’t want to disturb Clarke, he needs to move off the cot before he can’t even stand in the morning. As slow and quiet as he can, he rolls off cot and winces at a sharp stabbing pain in his ankle. When he rolls up his jeans, theres a yellowing bandage wrapped around his ankle.

He decides he doesn’t want to know.

Gabriels sitting outside on a log in front of a blazing fire – much bigger than he and Clarke had ever managed. He takes a seat on the log next to Gabriels, quietly staring into the fire too.

“It’s good to see you awake” Gabriel murmurs, “I didn’t expect you to be awake quite yet.”

“I’ve gotten used to taking watch halfway through the night” he grunts in reply. Gabriel frowns and cocks his head.

“You don’t have to take watch here, nothing’s going to happen.” Bellamy doesn’t respond, just scoffs at the notion that he’s supposed to trust someone he’s never met – especially here, where the bad has outweighed the good. “She didn’t want to bring you here, you know?”

That gets Bellamy’s attention, he looks at Gabriel in question “Oh?”

“I heard her shouting from here, when I got to you she’d just pulled you out. Practically jumped on you so I couldn’t get to you.”

Bellamy hopes his blush doesn’t show in the darkness of the night, but he’s sure Gabriel knows, by the way he’s looking at him. He doesn’t say anymore on the subject though, just throws something into the fire that makes it burst to life, flames morphing into swirls and pillars before settling down again.

“Who did it bring through?” Gabriel finally asks, “The book.”

“Clarke,” he responds quietly, though still hesitant to give out too much information. “I followed her through – not intentionally, she was just walking like she was in a trance, no matter how much I shouted her it was like I didn’t exist. I suppose that’s how she felt yesterday.”

“The book pulls through lost souls, I followed Josephine here too. She failed the test and I stayed with her.”

“Then you cursed her to live in a tower for the rest of eternity.”

“What would you have done, in my position?” Gabriel challenges “I couldn’t let her keep taking souls, not from people who hadn’t taken the test yet – people who still had a chance to go home.”

“I’m not judging you,” Bellamy counters “I understand why you’d do it. I saw what did with Clarke, the reflection in the mirror – freaked the life out of me, god only knows how she felt.” He pauses, there’s something else that caught his attention, “You said that when Josephine failed her test that you stayed too, did you pass your test?”

Gabriel smiles sadly into the flame, his skin may be young, but his eyes are old. “I never took my test, I knew I wasn’t going home without Josie so I backed out – there are some demons I couldn’t face unnecessarily. Would you go back without Clarke?”

“I don’t know,” Bellamy confesses softly “this is the first time we’ve ever really gotten along, and I suppose it was more out of necessity.”

“You don’t like her?”

Bellamy looks up in surprise, that wasn’t the deduction that should have been made, “I’ve always liked her. What’s not to like, she’s smart and funny and talented and beautiful, there was no chance she’d ever go for me. I guess I just kept my distance a bit too much.”

“Well if it makes you feel any better, I’d say she likes you too, she wouldn’t leave your side after – yeah.”

Yeah – after _that._ He still hasn’t made any sense of it in his head, the whole thing feels like a fever dream. Well, this entire land feels like a strange sort of dream, but that even more so.

“What was that? That pulled me in, I’ve never felt anything like it before.”

“You’ve heard the story of Echo and Narcissus from your world, right?”

Bellamy nods, “Echo was a forest Nymph who was cursed to repeat the last word said to her, she was rejected by Narcissus and died in the forest. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pond and drown – is that – was that -?”

“It’s a similar story, they get distorted over time, romanticised and brutalised, but that was Echo – in a sense anyway. She fell in love with Narcissus who drown in that very lake. She used to float, not so much fly, but when she was happy she’d float until you couldn’t see her anymore. When Narcissus died, she grounded herself by stealing the souls of men in revenge for the love that broke her heart. I don’t know how Clarke got you away from her, she must have a bit of magic in her.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy agrees softly, “She has.”

How old was this land? The myths Gabriel speaks of are ancient, if they really did originate from here, this place was older than he could possibly comprehend.

A new day dawns with the suns almost pressed against each other, they’re so close to getting to out yet still so far away. Their biggest obstacle is yet to come.

Clarke sits next to him as the sky starts to turn orange, Gabriel makes breakfast and now theres a pensive silence as they look into the dying flames.

“Bellamy,” Clarke murmurs, staring into the dying embers, “no matter what happens today, promise me that if you pass your test, you’ll go home, no matter what else happens you don’t wait for me.”

“Nothing is happening to you” he tells her vehemently, Gabriel said that the book pulls through lost souls, it pulled through Clarke because it didn’t think she’d come back out again. He’ll make damn sure that she comes home with him.

She nods, but he knows it’s just to appease him. He’s seen it since they’ve been here, her reluctance to accept that she’ll be going home, what hold does her demons have on her?

When they’re packed up and ready for the last leg of the journey, they’re once again faced with a strange goodbye to a rare helpful stranger.

“Thank you, for everything” Clarke smiles genuinely, though a little sad.

“It’s always odd to say, but I hope I don’t see you again,” Gabriel chuckles. “But if you happen to stay, you know where I am.”

“Any parting wisdom?” Bellamy asks, they need everything they can get right now.

Gabriel smiles as he looks between them. “Yeah – fairy tales aren’t just strange lands and magic books, it’s a feeling. You make your own fairy tales, happily ever afters don’t just exist in tales.”

He’s sure Clarke blushes as she ducks her head, but there’s not much time to dwell on it if they want to get to the end fast.

The trees seem to weep louder in this part of the forest, as if an ominous premonition as to what’s to come. The suns are starting to overlap now, there’s a mind-numbing hum in the air too, stronger than it was at Gabriels camp. They’re getting close, he can feel it.

They walk for hours, a tense silence between them and a heavy uncertainty about what they’re about to walk into. They almost miss the rustling of leaves ahead, and the girl stepping into their path and stopping them dead.

“Oh,” Clarke grabs hold of his arm to stop him, he’s so focused of what he’s about to walk into that he forgot to look where he was walking. “Hello”

The girl grins at them and waves, “Are you looking for the way out?”

“We are, are you?” Clarke questions softly, taking a tentative step towards the girl. She giggles and shakes her head.

“No, silly. I take people to their tests. The witch said it’s my special job.”

“Well that’s nice of her, I suppose” Clarke smiles kindly, the way you do at children, though he feels this child may be older than the two of them combined. “Lead the way.”

The girl takes Clarkes hand, pulling her further into the tress and Bellamy has no choice but to follow. The hums getting louder now, theres something else, something he can’t quite put his finger on. The girl talks animatedly along the way, it’s an obvious distraction technique but it’s working to some degree. She tells them her names Madi, among another thousand details.

“Are you stuck here?” Clarke asks the girl as she pulls her along.

“Yeah,” she pauses, face suddenly set in concentration. “The test is really hard, it shows you all the things you don’t want to see. But it’s alright, everybody here is really nice to me, even Josie shows me cool tricks with her mirrors.”

“I bet she does” Clarke mutters and Bellamy smiles to himself.

Waves.

That’s what he can hear, over the hum and the wailing of trees, he can hear waves in the distance, getting closer.

The wind howls and abruptly the trees clear and they’re standing on a cliffs edge as the suns completely overlap. The land deepens, the orange glow intensifies, and the hum turns into something more familiar – insects buzzing from below the cliff. This is it; he can feel it.

Clarke crouches in front of the girl so they’re the same height. “I’m sorry you got stuck here.”

“It’s okay,” the girl shrugs “I’m used to it, and I like seeing the new people.”

Clarke nods and smiles sympathetically. “Thank you for showing us the way.”

Madi beams at her “It’s alright, it’s my favourite job.”

“Well that’s good, ‘cause you’re doing a fantastic job.”

Madi grins, then pulls a red ribbon from her hair, tying it around Clarke’s wrist. “So you remember me when you get back to the real world.” She explains.

“Like I’d forget you,” Clarke grins, and taps the girls nose. The moments interrupted by a rumble of thunder in the distance.

“The witch is coming, good luck, I hope you pass!” The girl takes off with a skip and a wave, Clarke stands and makes her way back to Bellamy.

“Look out for wolves in the forest,” he calls out to the girl, she turns and wrinkles her nose in humour, then she disappears past the tree line and they’re left alone. Clarkes hand finds his and he squeezes reassuringly.

A door appears from thin air, dangerously close to the edge of the cliff, there’s no way anybody can go through that without plummeting down to whatever’s below them. But sure enough this land once again defies the odds and a woman walks through, almost robotic looking as she looks at them with cold eyes.

“Well done for making it this far,” she smiles insincerely, it sends a chill through him. A table appears to the left of them, with two mugs that can only contain something suspicious. “For you” she gestures towards the table, and now he knows that this is it, this will be their defining moments.

The drinks steaming and tastes like autumn, of cinnamon and clove. It tastes like fireworks and breath fogging in the dark, gloved hands clasped together and stolen kisses on cold noses.

The world shifts around him, darkens and turns then abruptly, the wind stops howling and the only sound is their stuttered breaths.

Where he stands is like the childhood stories he used to read, tucked under his covers with a flashlight, trying his hardest not to make a sound so his mother didn’t hear him and scold him for being awake way past his bedtime. Later, he’d read the stories to Octavia when she was a child and afraid of the monsters under her bed, she’d sneak into his room and hide under his covers. He’d tell her the stories that – looking back – were probably not child friendly, but it helped.

The fractured silence in broken by a clattering by his feet. Clarkes hand squeezes his tighter as they look down the sword bouncing on the blood-soaked concrete floor. Chain link fences surround them, it’s like a modern day colosseum – why would his demons bring him here?

“Remember when we used to fight?” comes a voice from above, all too familiar and yet, so foreign. It’s a voice that he only hears on answer machines and old videos, it’s a voice he’s tried to desperately hard to hear, but he understands why it never comes. Octavia’s staring down from a metal throne, one that no doubt she would put herself on given the chance. Eyes cold and dark bore down into him. “Mom used to say she’d throw us to the fighting pits, like the gladiators. Remember those stories?”

He doesn’t answer, he doesn’t need to. He knows that all this is in his head, these are his demons, screaming at him for all his past mistakes.

“How do you think mom would feel about this? About you abandoning me when I needed you the most? Your think she’d throw you to the fighting pits?”

“That’s not fair,” he argues with a shake of his head. “I always looked out for you. I tried to find you when you left, I still call you all the time and you never answer.”

“You think that’s what this is about?” She demands, voice hard. “You think that’s why I left?”

He stares at her and reminds himself that this is not his sister, this is just a hallucination. It’s a test.

“You abandoned the person that I am. When I didn’t fit into your ideals anymore you tried to change me instead of accepting who I was. This is your fault, you couldn’t accept that I was a person outside of being your sister.”

“That’s not true. I always accepted you, but you went off the rails. I couldn’t keep picking you up from police stations after bar fights. I was grieving mom too, I was doing everything in my power to hold it all together and you pushed me away every chance you got.”

Octavia scoffs and sneers at him. He’d given up everything for her, his dreams, his hobbies, his childhood. Anything he’d wanted to do got put on hold so he could raise her. He’s worked a job he hated and worked his way up to the top just to get money to put food on the table. Now he’s stuck in a job he hates instead of doing something he’s passionate about, something that would make getting out of bed in the morning worthwhile.

“I never asked for any of that” Octavia spits, because _of course_ she can hear what he’s thinking. “I never asked to burden anybody by being born. I didn’t ask for you to give up your dreams, that’s on you, big brother.”

“I never asked for it either” Bellamy proclaims, “I never asked for any of it but you know what? I did it anyway, not because you were my responsibility, not because I had to, but because I love you.”

It doesn’t soften her any, she just narrows her eyes down at him. “And what a poor job you did. What are you left with after all of that? A dead mother, a sister who wants nothing to do with you and a job you hate. No hobbies or passions, you put them aside and blamed me for it. Is it any wonder I left?”

Maybe she’s right.

Maybe he is a failure.

After everything he did, everything he thought was right he’s left no richer. Sure, he’s got money in the bank for a first time, but there’s no one there to share it with. There’s no sister to take care of, anybody who ever cared about him he’s pushed away – and for what? Now he’s left alone, heart deceptively fragile and lonely nights serve to think of his past mistakes.

“This isn’t on you,” Clarkes voice break through his self doubt, though it does little to quell it. “Bellamy you did everything in your power to help her. You did more for her when you were a child that some adults do for their own children. That’s amazing, don’t you see that?”

He didn’t see that, he saw a failure. He failed his sister when she needed him the most, he tried to curb her anger when he should have been better for her, understood her better. He should have been better.

“How about when she failed you then?” Clarke demands, “What about when you were grieving your mother and having to pick Octavia up from whatever she’d been doing that night? Why didn’t she give a shit about your feelings? Why were you the one left to pick up the pieces? She’s a full grown adult, Bellamy. You’ve spent your life looking out for everybody else, the least she could have done is shown some decency to you.

“She may not have asked for you to take care of her, but you did – because that’s who you are. You’re a good person. You’re kind and caring, you’d do anything for anyone. For god sake you followed me into some living nightmare just to make sure I was alright, and you don’t even like me. Because that’s who you are.”

She’s right – not about everything, but where was Octavia when he needed help? Why was it left to him to arrange a funeral and pick his little sister out of the gutter?

He turns to face Octavia, she’s staring down in cold detachment and self righteousness. It’s the look of victory he remembers so vividly.

“You are not my responsibility. You never were, I was a child when you were born – and I know that you never asked for it, but I loved you and I would have done anything for you. You never once shared that notion though. I didn’t deserve that.”

The arena starts to crumble, he’s winning. The world around them fractures and splinters away.

“I get that you were angry, but I didn’t fail you. You were fed, and clothed, and loved. That’s a hell of a lot more than I was growing up. So take your anger and righteousness, do whatever the hell you want with it but none of it is my fault.”

The last of the arena is blown away off the cliffs edge. Thunder rumbles above and the witch smiles at him.

“Congratulations.” Her voice is smooth and robotic, chillingly inhuman but Bellamy can’t bring himself care. Clarke throws her arms around his neck and hugs him in glee.

“I knew you could do it” she grins into his neck. He hugs back with all of his might, _he did it._ He was getting out of here, he’d faced his demons and come out victorious.

“Clarke,” the witch interrupts, “I’d like to offer you a deal.”

Her hold around him loosens, but he doesn’t let go of her, frightened she could be swept away with the wind at any moment. The tables still in front of them, and Clarkes mug is still there, ready for her test, but there’s something else too, a small bottle with a glowing pink liquid in. Dread settles in his stomach, nothing good can come from this.

“Many face their demons, but many don’t.” The witch starts. “Some go mad by what their demons show them. You’ve already become a great legend here, imagine what you could do if you stayed?”

An arm drops from his neck and hesitates over the table.

“You don’t have to face your demons, you can stay here. Think about all you could do with the magic this land possesses.”

For one, heart-stopping second, her hand goes for the bottle, but he holds onto her wrist, pulling her back.

“What are you doing?” His voice shakes in panic, after all of this, after how hard she’d fought to get here she was just going to throw it away like that? She was just going give up?

Her eyes fill with tears as she looks to him, silently pleading him to understand. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do this. You heard her, people go mad in there, I’m not going to beat it, I’m not like you.”

“No, you’re not like me, you’re so much more. Do you think I’d have survived a day here without you? We got through this because of you, if anybody deserves to go home, it’s you. Please, at least just try.”

She pauses, and for the longest moment he doesn’t think she’ll accept it, but her hand moves to the mug and brings it to her lips. He sighs in relief as the world once again tilts around them, he squeezes his eyes shut until the the humming stops and the wind ceases.

It’s cold, wherever they’ve ended up. They’re surrounded by white marble, with cracks in the walls that spiders crawl in and out of. Lining the walls are busts that seem to be watching them. Tears of vivid red blood run down their cracking faces, silently weeping.

“Clarke, where the hell are we?” He utters, if he thought his demons were bad…

“The Griffin family mausoleum.” She looks around in apprehension, eyes flitting, not focusing on one spot, not that he can blame her. The whole place is a bit terrifying, and that’s coming from the person who manifested a fighting arena.

She holds onto his hand again, pulling him though a draughty corridor that seems to be endless. No matter how much they walk the corridor continues, the end getting further and further away from them.

Finally, when the end stops moving away from them they come to stop at a plaque on the wall, still shiny and new, he doesn’t need to look at the engraving to know who it belongs to. Clarkes hand around his is like a vice, blood pools between them as the cuts on her hand reopens.

“Clarke –”

“He would be ashamed of you” comes a scathing voice from the shadows. Out steps an older woman, with long greying hair and sunken cold eyes. Although he’s never actually seen Abby Griffin before, he can see the resemblance enough to know who she is, and he’s heard enough about her to know why she’d be Clarkes demon. “He worked so hard to make a good life for you, he did everything in his power to make sure you had the best opportunities and you threw it back at him.”

Clarke shrinks back into him, tense and small he’s never seen anything quite like it from her. “I didn’t throw it back at him, I followed my dreams, it’s what he would have wanted.”

Abby laughs bitterly “You think he would have wanted to watch you become a starving artist? You can’t even pay your rent some months, let alone eat. Is _that_ what you think your father would have wanted for you? He wanted you to make something of yourself, not chase some pipe dream based on a hobby.”

Clarke doesn’t respond, just stares at the plaque in front of them. In the reflection, he can see tears brimming in her eyes.

“It’s your fault he’s dead.”

Bellamy stiffens in shock, he knew Clarkes father had died just before they met, but he didn’t know the details, all he’d heard was it was a traumatic incident that no one spoke about. Clarkes eyes screw shut, a tear falling down her cheek.

“He didn’t want to go on that trip, but you convinced him, even found the flight that killed him.”

“I didn’t know.” Clarke whispers, her voice cracks in emotion. “How could I?”

“You didn’t have to know, you just needed to accept that he didn’t want to go.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry.” Abby scoffs, “You’re not sorry. You’re never sorry, you never think of anybody but yourself. You always drag everybody around you down. Look at what you’ve done here – look at what you’ve put Bellamy through, all because once again you couldn’t leave things alone.”

She was losing, he could feel it. Maybe she was more of a lost soul than he thought.

He can’t let her lose.

“Why are you even trying to leave? What kind of life do you have to go back to? Nobody likes you; your so-called friends tolerate you at best, they don’t want you around, nobody does.”

“Clarke,” he sighs, surely she knows that’s not true, she can’t think that about herself.

“They make plans without because they don’t like you, they don’t want you around. They’d all be much happier if you just disappeared.”

Panic rises in his chest as the ground rumbles beneath their feet. He lets go of her hand to hold onto her shoulder, forcing her to look at him. “You can’t possibly think that about yourself, Clarke.”

The look she gives him tells him all he needs to know. She never had any plans of making it out of here, it was always him. She was always trying to get him out. “Nobody is better off without you, it’s not true, you have to know that.”

She shakes her head, mouth opening to speak but Abby cuts her off.

“Of course it’s true. He’s lying to you Clarke. He’s thinking of himself, of his own guilt – but he’ll get over it, when he sees how much better of without you they are.”

“Stop, now.” He growls at Abby. Realistically, he knows this is all in Clarkes head, but he needs somebody to tell off. “You have to fight this. Please, come back with me.”

She shakes her head, tears falling in earnest now. “I can’t.”

“No, I won’t accept that. What are you staying here for? What could you possibly have here that you don’t have at home? You don’t actually think we all hate you, you can’t think that.”

“It’s the truth though,” Abby pipes up, “You know it better than anyone. How nobody wants her there. What does she bring to a friendship? She has no money, she’s a failing artist, a failed daughter - you’re a failure, Clarke.”

“Fight” he shouts suddenly, willing her more than ever to just retaliate. “I’m telling you, none of this is true. They’re just demons, you have to fight them and they’ll go away.”

Clarke closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, Bellamy places his hands either side of her face and wipes the tears away with his thumbs. “Come back with me, please. I need you.”

She steps back, and momentarily his heart stops, thinking she succumbing to the darkness that surrounds them, but she turns to Abby with fire in her eyes.

“I am more than just your daughter.” Her voice is strong now, steady and confident. Pride swells in him – she’s doing it, she’s fighting. “I’m more than just an achievement for you to parade around. I’m my own person whether you accept that or not. Dads death was not my fault, I was only seventeen, I was trying to do what was best while you were _divorcing_ him. But we never talk about that, do we? He wouldn’t have been thinking about that trip if it wasn’t for you, but still I get the blame. Not anymore.”

The cracks in the walls deepen, light filters through them now, shining into the shadows.

“I might not be successful now, but someday I will be, and then it’s going to be your loss for rejecting me. You’re my mother, you’re supposed to love me no matter what but the second I didn’t fit into your agenda anymore you kicked me out. That’s all you.”

Abby’s face cracks like porcelain – at any moment she’ll shatter.

“I have people around me that love and appreciate me now, I’m sorry that you can’t accept that but that’s not my fault, you’re the one with prejudice clouding your view, not me. If you were half the mother you pretended to be then you’d see that. Someday you’ll be the one overcome with regret, and I’ll be here, living my life to my true self.”

She shatters to the ground as the wind picks up again, the mausoleum crumbling to dust. They’re back on the cliffs edge, the clouds gone now, just the colliding suns fill the orange sky now.

There’s a flash of anger on the witch’s face, but it’s quickly blanked out again. There’s something about Clarke that she wants, but she’s not getting it, not in this life, not in the next.

“Congratulations” she smiles flatly, but Bellamy ignores her and wraps his around around Clarke instead.

“I thought I’d lost you there,” he murmurs into her head, she laughs and shakes her head.

“No chance, you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“Like I’d ever try.”

The world glows around them, it’s time to leave. The witch opens the door over the edge, he can already see the dim glow from the naked bulb hanging in the basement. It feels like another lifetime ago, searching for a bathroom bulb.

Hand in hand, they step back through, together. The damp, dusty smell overwhelms him, but it’s a welcome feeling, they’re home.

The door slams shit behind them, and he blinks in confusion, his brain takes a second too long to catch up on everything that just happened. Looking at Clarke, she feels the same.

There’s no blood or dirt on their clothes now, they look exactly like they did before they stepped through. He picks up Clarkes hand, the cuts are gone now, her skins soft and unmarked now. He runs a thumb over where the cut was. The books back on the shelf, covered in a layer of dust as if Clarke had never picked it up.

“Did that actually happen?” Clarke questions with a laugh. He was wondering the same, but if Clarke remember it too, surely they weren’t having a shared hallucination? “The ribbon,” she gasps suddenly, and sure enough, wrapped around her wrist is the red ribbon, the only solid reminder of their time there, proof it wasn’t all a dream.

 _It wasn’t all a dream._ All of that truly did happen, Clarke had saved his life – multiple times and was so close never coming home, he was a breath away from standing here alone.

Without thinking about it, he pulls her in close and crashes his lips against hers, one arm winding around her waist and a hand cradling her face. She clings to him and sighs into the kiss, there’s so much he wants to say, there’s so much he needs to tell her, all of which can wait. Now, he just wants to be close to her.

A flash of light interrupts the moment, his arms wrap around her protectively, wondering what the hell could be happening now, they’ve faced their demons, they’re home - there’s no way they’re going back there.

“I knew it!” Miller hollers from the doorway to the basement, phone in hand. “I told you they were they were down here boning.”

“Oh, come on,” Murphy groans, “are you two kidding me?”

Clarke laughs in relief and drops her head to his chest.

“How long were we down here?” He asks, Murphy rolls his eyes.

“Like, half an hour. We sent you down to tell Jasper that the demons didn’t get to Clarke, you can imagine how he’s being now.”

Half an hour. They were away for days in whatever strange place that was, but here time had barely moved. Clarke steps back to look at him in wonder. They laugh at the absurdness, if they didn’t both remember, he’d think that was all some strange dream or hallucination. But it wasn’t, because Clarke’s here in his arms, they’re both safely away from their demons.

He takes a step back, to try and explain – well, what can he explain? Why half an hour ago they were acting like they hated each other, and now they’re kissing in a haunted basement. Before he can say anything though, his foot collides with a box.

“Oh so you did find the lightbulbs.” Miller snorts, and sure enough, there’s the box Clarke had come down for in the first place, magically appearing at their feet.

Miller and Murphy leave when Bellamy promises they’re right behind them, and he’s left with a thousand things he wants to say.

“Hey,” he murmurs, brushing her hair out of her face. “Nothings changed, I meant everything I said in there. I need you, I wouldn’t have survived a day without you.”

She nods and smiles “I meant everything, too. But we can talk later, right now we have to go explain to our friends what changed in the last half an hour, since I’m sure Miller’s probably already printed out the picture of us kissing.”

He laughs, “we could always tell them the truth.”

“I’m sure that’ll go down great. We’ll think of something.” She laces her fingers with his, and he remembers what Gabriel told him, fairy tales aren’t just new, magical lands, or stories in a book, they’re a feeling,

It’s the feeling he gets looking at Clarke now, her strength and determination, her ability to overcome her demons to come back to him.

Clarke’s his fairy tale – one he’ll never stop fighting for.

**Author's Note:**

> I am accepting prompts on Tumblr (excuseyouclarke) as part of t100fic-for-BLM. Please please check out the fantastic writers we have and the amazing works that have already been published - all for an amazing cause!


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